The Gunpowder Plot
Tower Vaults | ★★★★✩

London’s latest immersive experience recalls a time when a religious minority lived in fear of persecution. Practitioners of this hounded faith were tortured and killed. Praying had to be done in secret. This is what it was to be a Catholic in Jacobean England and in particular 1605, the year a munitions expert called Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed, trying to blow up parliament.

Yet the genius of this high tech show — which combines Virtual Reality with live acting — is that it compels each of its small audiences (of up to 16) to consider the moral conundrum of every conflict: How many innocents should die in the service of a good cause?

ESHY MOYO as Thomas in The Gunpowder Plot Credit Mark Dawson Photography

Eshy Moyo as Thomas

Up until that moment, this revival of England’s most daring conspiracy works as a pulse-quickening thriller. Our small audience is hurried through underground dark, dank vaults and corridors, not a stone’s throw from the actual Tower of London, where dissidents and Fawkes himself were held.

We have been cast as Catholics and thrown into a cell with a long-suffering co-religionist who faces torture and death. Our unlikely escape is enabled by an agent working for the Crown.

His reasons become clear in a briefing room in which the walls become alive with the sights and sounds of 17th century Westminster. There are children playing and crowded markets, when an almighty, immersive, virtual explosion reveals the death and destruction that will result when Fawkes’s 36 barrels of gunpowder explode.

LEDA DOUGLAS as Lady Cecil The Gunpowder Plot Credit Mark Dawson Photography

Leda Douglas as Lady Cecil

It is here we are invited to be double agents and choose between working for the plotters or the Crown. This adds genuine intellectual heft to a show whose VR moments feel more like a theme park ride, albeit at times a fascinating one. The most vivid of these is when, with VR goggles over our eyes, we hold onto ropes as we are zip-wired out of the Tower and over Jacobean London.

Later, we are on the Thames, being rowed upstream, under a full moon, past galleons and skiffs, with our explosive cargo, to the mother of all parliaments. We feel the boat rocking and inhale the smell of the river— all part of what this production describes as Layered Reality, which rather implies that the Virtual kind on its own is already as outdated as a pair of 1960s 3D spectacles.

SEB SLADE as Thomas The Gunpowder Plot Credit Mark Dawson Photography

Seb Slade as Thomas

In the boat, our fellow passenger is none other than Guy Fawkes himself, played by a digitised version of Tom Felton of the Harry Potter films.

Felton, it should be noted, can be seen in the flesh in the West End hit 2:22 A Ghost Story, which boasts the same writer, Danny Robins, as this immersive production.

It says a lot for live theatre that out of these two offerings, the play has the greatest emotional impact. Yet this show is a genuine step forward in the evolution of Virtual Reality theatre.

Ultimately, it forces its audience to tackle moral questions, while at the same time experiencing the thrill of a fairground ride.