You Me Bum Bum Train's creators on the cult hit show: 'life just feels lacking when Bum Bum Train is not there'
It is fiendishly difficult to describe You Me Bum Bum Train, the cult interactive experience that is returning to London this week after an eight-year absence. Kate Bond, the co-creator, likens it to a blue whale: “It’s much bigger than you. You’re in awe of this creature. But you’re also terrified of it.” Which may or may not be helpful.
Technically, I suppose, it’s theatre. Audience members are guided through a cascade of scenes, populated with hundreds of actors and extras following something approaching a script. The Times listed it among the “best plays” of the 21st century. But Bond and her collaborator Morgan Lloyd, who met while studying illustration in Brighton University, have no background in theatre nor much interest in it. “I don’t really go to the theatre. It makes me feel claustrophobic,” says Bond. She cites the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and the absurdist comedian Hans Teeuwen as more formative influences.
Another point of comparison might be Punchdrunk, Shunt or similar immersive theatre companies that exploded in the Noughties, but this rather underplays the level of interaction on offer. The difference between, say, Secret Cinema and You Me Bum Bum Train is a bit like the difference between watching a TV programme about drugs and actually taking drugs yourself. As for what actually happens in the show? Well, sorry, I’ve had to sign a slightly scary non-disclosure agreement which means I can’t tell you any details at all — other than the fact that 77 “passengers” will take the Bum Bum Train each night in a secret West End location.
I’m not even supposed to tell you about the You Me Bum Bum Train show I saw 12 years ago, when the company took over an abandoned shopping centre near the Olympics site in Stratford. But what I can say is that it was the best thing I’ve ever seen in London — or anywhere else for that matter.
I can remember each of the scenes I tumbled through in minute detail to this day, as well as the terror, the euphoria, the joy, the feeling that all my senses had been blown wide open.
The show’s celebrity fans — Madonna, Stephen Fry, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and more — have been no less hyperbolic. Indeed, many passengers have credited the show with helping them change course in life. “One passenger said she was in a very deep dark depression,” says the pair’s executive assistant Alyssa Leighton. “She said that it was one of the only moments she’d had in years where she felt completely present. She forgot that she was dying.”
We’re all talking over coffee at the Soho Hotel during a break in rehearsals: co-founders Bond, Lloyd and Leighton, a more recent recruit. If it sounds rather stressful putting all this on, well, it is. The show relies on 15,000 volunteers to build the sets, source the props, act out the scenes — and there is no guarantee anyone is going to show up, let alone do what they’re asked to do.
“Everybody’s pulling together to pull off the impossible, but as ever, it does feel impossible. That’s the running theme of each production,” says Bond. And yet, they all seem to be in their element. “What we’re actually doing is creating an amazing community — and that’s so hard to find in London,” says Lloyd.
In fact, for all the show’s insane stresses — say, trying to find 40 trombonists with 24 hours’ notice, say, or repairing a bit of malfunctioning set mid-show — by far the hardest period has been the past eight years, when the Bum Bum Train ran out of track for a while.
Since the last show in 2016, three productions have been cancelled, including a scheduled 2021 run that fell victim to Covid. Both Bond and Lloyd experienced severe depression during that time and Bond, who is bipolar, has been hospitalised. “Life just feels lacking when Bum Bum Train is not there,” she says. “Not to have that for eight years was really difficult.”
Still, the strength of her and Lloyd’s mutual support is palpable. Lloyd credits Bond as the chief-bringer-together of people. “There’s something about the community that is essential to this. That comes from Kate.” Bond is no less effusive. “Morgan is amazing in a crisis. It’s quite amazing to watch. He goes into superhero mode.”
Bond first conceived of the show in 2004. She was living in Brighton after her degree, a “classic lost 24-year-old”, washing dishes in a restaurant, wondering what to do with her life. “I didn’t have much of a career path. I was quite disconnected from what I was doing.”
Then, completely unexpectedly, an eccentric neighbour died — “God bless her” — and left Bond £20,000 in her will. She used some of it to go travelling to Mexico but found the experience unsatisfying. Then, one night she found herself in a small house in Oaxaca, drinking white Russians and doodling a poster depicting a train taking some passengers out on an adventure. She called it “Bum Bum Train” — “the drawing came before the concept”. So she decided to come back to Brighton and make it happen, enlisting her old friend Lloyd.
The first Bum Bum Train was basically a glorified student club night. She and Lloyd placed each “passenger” in a wheelchair and wheeled them through a series of “environments” that they rigged up with scrap material, toilet paper and things they found in skips. The idea was to recreate the experience of “travelling through different worlds”.
The first event was nearly a disaster. These were the days when people still smoked indoors. Toilet paper is flammable. If it wasn’t for a friend putting out a fire with his hands, it might have all ended there. In the event, it was a roaring success and the pair went on to stage ever more elaborate shows in squats and abandoned buildings, funded by the rest of the inheritance and Jobseekers Allowance. “It was just intuitive,” says Bond. “We had no structure, no production meetings, nothing. We’d just call people up and ask them if they could help out.”
In 2009, Bond and Lloyd won an Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award which earned them some crucial funding and a level of theatre-world respectability. The following year, they produced a sell-out show in collaboration with the Barbican and won an Evening Standard Theatre Award among rave reviews.
Their success brought criticism from the actors union Equity which objected to their reliance on volunteers. Still, they remain committed to their grassroots community-led ethic. “The idea of doing something creative is kind of at odds with a business,” says Lloyd. “No one ever walks into a cathedral and asks: ‘Yes, but did they bring it in on budget?’”
The finances are rather hard to grasp. Bond and Lloyd now draw a small wage — as do a dozen or so other members of the production team — but mostly the production runs on a “wing and a prayer”.
They rely on donations from patrons but mostly the many, many hours that those volunteers are willing to provide. Lloyd estimates that if this were all professionalised, the tickets would have to be £6,000 as opposed to £100 and the show would lose its essential magic.
Non-actors, he says, actually play their parts a lot better than professional ones. But such is their commitment to the quality of the event that only a tiny number of people — 2,500 or so — can actually experience the show as a passenger.
And this is how You Me Bum Bum Train differs from any regular production. You might reasonably expect a play to involve a few hundred audience members focusing their attention on an actor on a stage. You Me Bum Bum Train involves hundred of performers focusing on you alone and your decisions in the moment.
Many passengers find this liberating. “Normally, other people’s opinions of you can hold you in a certain state,” says Lloyd. “But because nobody else is with them they’re liberated. They can be a different person. It teaches you a lot about morality. Other parts of yourself come forward.”
Not everyone responds well. Once a passenger held a performer at (plastic) knife point. There have been psychotic episodes and panic attacks. However, the thing that remained with me from the 2012 show was an overwhelming feeling of comfort and support. I wanted to live there for a long time.
Ruby Wax, who suffers from severe depression, described the 2015 show as “the best therapy”. This is important to the show’s ethos. The 2016 run also raised £120,000 for charity via a VIP auction and included a special performance for people undergoing palliative care. “Lots of the people said that the worst thing about being diagnosed with a terminal illness is that people just ignore them,” says Bond. “They were really happy that we acknowledged them.”
This community of those working on the show, for both Bond and Lloyd, is where the magic lies. “The passenger experience was what used to drive us,” says Lloyd. “It was all about the person going through the show. But there was this byproduct which was the community that was making this happen. And that has become our focus. You bond with people like you’ve never bonded before. At the end of the show, volunteers often come and tell us how this has really helped them out of depression. And there are just a lot of people in ordinary careers who suddenly remember, this is a thing they love.”
Almost everyone who has seen the show returns to that idea, that it’s a journey back to the experience of being a child again — only within the body and mind of an adult. “You know when you’re at a family gathering and all the grown-ups are being quite boring having dinner but all the kids are on some really fun mission?” says Bond. “Bum Bum Train is basically full of those kids.”
You Me Bum Bum Train opens on November 26. To volunteer, sign up at bumbumtrain.com. This year’s charity partners are War Child and Raise Your Hands
