Peaky Blinders: The Rise review - a visually spectacular open-world experience
📸: Mark Senior
You will love it if:
You love open-world, free-roam experiences like Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk
You love Peaky Blinders (the world building really does fans proud)
Not for you if:
You are not keen on the ambiguity and FOMO inherent in choose-your-own-pathway experiences
Tommy Shelby is looking to take over London and has called a family meeting at the Camden Garrison. We are members of the different gang families and must decide whether we help the Shelby’s with their ambition or, frankly, act in our own interests.
The pre-show personality test told us we’re in the Bucklands which means we’re Irish, wearing green and apparently quite angry. We have major beef with the Shelbys which turns out to be extremely useful, because it quickly transpires that we can choose exactly what we want to do and how to spend our time within the experience. Having a backstory means we can easily validate our opportunistic choices.
And, lots of choices there are in what is essentially a visually spectacular open world with all the smells, sights and angst of post-War Britain. The old Camden horse hospital’s old stalls and dark rafters provide the most perfect backdrop to 1920s London you can imagine and there’s a staggering amount to do in terms of storylines to follow, characters to talk to, errands to run, gambling and of course drinking with the bars helpfully being open all the way through the performance.
This is everything you’ve ever wanted if you’ve dreamed of inhabiting the Peaky Blinders world. It’s decidedly gritty and grown up, with more trigger warnings than I’ve ever seen listed at a show. The actors playing key characters would make any superfan proud with a lot of effort clearly going into perfecting minute character quirks. Negotiating with Camden king pin Alfie Solomon, masterfully portrayed by Sam Blythe, and getting brutally put back in our place is the best fun we had all night.
However, if you were after the cohesive narrative experience that comes with a standard theatre performance, this probably won’t scratch that itch. The sheer amount of options and pathways means that there’s a high chance of FOMO.
For example, we chose to focus on the in-production game of making as much money as possible. We were quite good at this but by the time we had made enough to open up additional opportunities, it was the end of the show and we couldn’t cash in which left us feeling like maybe we had wasted time and should have followed more storylines instead.
Top tip from me, there’s no way to make the right choices so just do what looks most fun at the time and don’t get as bogged down in ‘winning the experience’ as we did.
This open world set up also made it difficult to follow a cohesive storyline throughout the evening. Rather than a true overarching narrative structure (and associated payoff), we felt more like we witnessed individual scenes and vignettes.
Don’t get me wrong, some of these scenes were absolutely brilliant, most notably Tommy Shelby’s (Craig Hamilton) electric entrance and a wink wink nudge nudge deal with Capone (James Bryant). Also bravo to Megan Shandley, we were most emotionally invested in her Lizzie Stark as she is brutally used for the Shelby Company’s own ends.
Often though characters seemed to disappear as quickly as they emerged and you were left wondering if the writing was relying on a more intimate knowledge of the show than I or my companion had in order to fill in the blanks that would tie these scenes together.
The overall effect was that it felt more like Secret Cinema - a big free roam space in which you catch glimpses from the original screenplay - rather than the previous work of Immersive Everywhere including the Great Gatsby and Dr Who: Time Fracture, which without doubt deliver a beginning, middle and an end.
(With a bit of research, it turns out that director Tom Maller has in fact been behind multiple Secret Cinema productions as well as the above mentioned shows, which might suggest that this design is very much intentional)
All in all, we had great fun, the two and a half hours went quickly and I would certainly go again to find pathways untaken. A great experience even if it doesn’t quite feel appropriately marketed as theatre.