For the uninitiated, there is still no greater thrill in theatre than tumbling through the rollercoaster of You Me Bum Bum Train. It is a kaleidoscopic head rush; the fullest of lives flashing before your eyes. The form – a rapid-fire succession of scenarios that plonk you, blinking and disorientated, into the protagonist’s shoes – is exhilarating, potent and unlike anything offered by day-to-day life.
For around forty minutes, you are thrown into the middle of a major identity crisis. One moment you might pop up at the despatch box in the House of Commons; the next in a soup kitchen’s late-night queue. You never know what’s through the next door. Strangers greet you by name and hurl you into the action, always apparently fully convinced that you know exactly what’s going on. Imagine a network of wardrobes leading to Narnia. Imagine a short-circuiting Tardis. Imagine Mr Benn with serious amnesia.
Riding The Bum Bum Train feels not dissimilar to running fast than you can manage, in that way that children do. Off-balance, you’re only able to remain upright by increasing your speed, which, of course, makes retaining poise and control even harder. Eventually – inevitably – you trip.
I’ve written before about the problems of return audience members. When you arrive front-footed and braced for anything, the experience changes. It becomes easier, slower and more about playful improvisation than unexpected impulse. It strokes your ego, rather than assaulting it; panders rather than challenges.
Morgan Lloyd and Kate Bond haven’t entirely solved that for the current incarnation, which has taken over an old sorting office on New Oxford Street. There remain too many empty corridors – perhaps a necessary byproduct of increasing the scale – which allows you to take stock and regain composure, but they have upped the stress levels of their chosen scenarios.
In previous years, scenarios have mostly involved a small handful of volunteer-performers, often integral to the scene. Burglars and barbers. Your actions are private, between you and the actors facilitating the scene, who are therefore acting along before watching and judging. Here, however, there are eyes on you at almost every turn: audiences, crowds and cameras watch your flailing efforts and getting it ‘right’ suddenly matters. After my first Bum Bum Train, I raised “the slightest of suspicions that the joke might just be on you.” In this instance, there are sequences where that’s openly the case, but that openness makes it more inclusive, less private snigger at your expense.
At present, what You Me Bum Bum Train has to say about the world, it still achieves largely through form, i.e. regardless of the scenarios within. It concerns the primacy of the individual and the ubiquity of televisual and cinematic fictions. That we know exactly what’s expected of us in each of the situations – no matter how removed they are from personal experience – speaks volumes about our cultural referents.
There are two related questions, here. First, does it set out to critique that culture or is it content to simply rely on it? Beneath this, then, is the question as to whether it warrants – or even wants – the status of art rather than extravagant fairground ride.
Presently, the shuffle effect – tossing us from celebrity to dole queue – means that YMBBT is no more than the sum of its parts. Individually, the scenarios provide a snapshot of someone else’s life and, as such, foster empathy. Often the roles you’re thrown into are much harder than you’d expect – and there are a couple of real corkers in this incarnation, which make you totally re-think the way you look at others in the outside world. But, at this level, the whole is pretty much a mix-tape: an assortment of semi-arbitrary ‘what-ifs’ and ‘wouldn’t-it-be-cools’.
Taken together, the important thing is that we find ourselves in a situation, rather than this particular situation. How, Lloyd and Bond need to ask, can it add up to more? How can the scenes coalesce into an overall dramaturgy? How can a particular Bum Bum Train journey achieve a thematic thrust in spite of its dependence on being unpredictable? How, in other words, can content match form in speaking about the real world?
If it is unable to do so – assuming we want to grant it meaning – then YMBBT is the equivalent of a playwright endlessly writing the same play under different guises. Each will say the same thing in the same way. If its creators don’t probe its possibilities, they risk making their form inert. For all its unique, elating brilliance, it’s time the Bum Bum Train got an upgrade.
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