'Secret Cinema' smashes through the screen
LONDON: Under the menacing eye of guards, the cinema-goers sit in silence as their 1950s bus rumbles through London.
Suddenly, a prison looms out of the darkness.
Welcome to Secret Cinema, where the film is not just on the screen viewers can wander up to the characters, brought to life by actors in a setting that seems to have been plucked straight out of the movie.
Guests arrive armed with nothing more than a string of cryptic emails detailing where to go and how to dress. They don't even know what film they are going to see, despite having paid #43.50 ($70) each for a ticket.
“You tell people nothing. They have no idea of what they're going to see, what they're going to experience,” said Fabien Riggall, who founded Secret Cinema in 2007.
“And once they get there, they become more open and more adventurous.” This innovative approach to cinema which spreads to New York and Athens in April has seen organisers transform a warehouse into the futuristic dystopia of “Blade Runner”, a park into “Lawrence of Arabia” and dank tunnels into “The Battle of Algiers”.
Movie-goers have found themselves conducting mock scientific experiments before a screening of “Prometheus” in a warehouse-turned-spaceship, and operating a pretend penicillin racket before sitting down to watch “The Third Man”.
The latest instalment of the adventure offered the crowds a taste of the harsh prison life suffered by Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins in the 1994 classic “The Shawshank Redemption”.
Told to arrive at an east London library wearing 1950s clothing, they were led into a mock courtroom and sentenced to much giggling for crimes ranging from kidnapping to bigamy.
The new convicts were then shuttled by vintage bus to an abandoned school, transformed by the Secret Cinema team into a grim US prison.
Hustled inside by uniformed “prison guards”, they were forced to strip off their 1950s attire much to the dismay of those who had ignored instructions to wear long underwear.
Prisoners swapped their trilby hats and trench coats for grey uniforms and spent the three hours before the screening exploring their jail, periodically harassed by the guards as they munched on burgers bought from the “infirmary”.
Blurring performance and audience
