It may set Harry Potter fans’ hearts aflutter to know that Tom Felton – best known as Draco Malfo – is playing Guy Fawkes in this immersive experience written by Danny Robins and directed by Hannah Price. He is part of the digital cast though, appearing on our VR headsets, even if the show is partly sold on his starry presence.
It turns out this production, which takes us into labyrinthine vaults adjacent to the Tower of London, has a more-than-able live cast playing Catholics and Protestants, plotters, spies, double agents and upholders of the crown, to immerse us in Fawkes’ tumultuous underground world.
We are placed into groups and led into a war room, of sorts, to be told that when we walk through the next door, we will be stepping into 5 November 1605, hours before the plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
In the belly of the vaults – a grid of tunnel-like corridors and boiler rooms – we meet prisoners such as William (Lucas O’Mahoney), who is barefoot, black-eyed and shackled by a terrifying hooded guard. William looks at us blinkingly before he is led away and confirms us as fellow Catholic dissenters. There is also our companion, Thomas (Cormac Elliott, very characterfully played), a cheeky caped spy who appears sporadically, calls us “bastards” and works for the crown. Something of a Jacobean Indiana Jones, he helps us navigate the perils of these tunnels and delivers us to his boss, Lady Cecil (Kalifa Taylor), who recruits us as spies to thwart Fawkes’ plot.
Soon it is unclear – to me at least – who we are working for. Characters dash across our paths, including a live Guy Fawkes (Rufus McGrath), before disappearing again. But no matter, because scarpering through these dimly lit tunnels, with dripping taps, explosive sounds and smoky corridors (lighting design by Robbie Butler, sound by Adrienne Quartly) is quite the adventure.
The VR headset experience, though, does not carry the wow factor. For anyone who has seen Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, it feels incredibly familiar: the same boat journey complete with judders; stations at the end with a final compilation of images accompanied by rousing music. Layered Reality also created that show and seem to have used it as a blueprint for this one’s VR aesthetic.
Except here it is not as impressive and does not make as much sense. Why do we take the boat ride across London with Fawkes? Why does the boat then seem to fly, complete with its oars? And why are we floating over a burning city? There are three VR headset moments to augment our experience, the first of which did not work for everyone in my group. The last, which traces the mythology around Fawkes in the centuries following his execution, is especially disappointing – not in the graphics but in the rather vague points it seeks to make.
Meanwhile, the show asks us to take sides: with the crown or with the conspirators. It sets up its central ethical dilemma by showing us an explosion – a projection of the harm that Fawkes’ plan might do to the city and its people, manifested in astounding graphics across the walls of one room, in which we see a mother lose her child. But we are also told about the state persecution of Catholics, and hear King James’ men killing a priest as we hide in a cupboard.
While the dilemma is a valid one, asking the question of whether violence is ever politically necessary, the problem for those of us who know the outcome is that the taking of sides seems rather pointless.
Maybe not for tourists who are less familiar with how this well-known episode of English history played out – and we are given the full lowdown in luminous graphics at the end. As a show for tourists, this will no doubt be a money-spinner, but it has some thrills and spills for the rest of us too.
The Gunpowder Plot is at Tower Vaults, London, until 4 September
