Review: ROOM 13, Battersea Arts Centre

Halloween is the season when London’s theatres let the bats out of the belfry, and any venue with a draughty corridor suddenly has a ghost story to sell. Battersea Arts Centre has gone one better. It has cast itself as the haunted house, and in Immersive Octopus’s latest interactive drama, the building is less backdrop than leading player.

The fire that tore through the old town hall more than a decade ago has left scars that go deeper than the plasterwork. Productions involving flame are still welcome (last year's Handle With Care, for example, ended by torching a box and everything in it) as long as the burning happens outside.

This is not a show that goes anywhere near the funny bone and, like most things that take themselves seriously, it begins with paperwork. A Waiver of Responsibility is handed to all participants and sets the scene. The Circle of the Veil has you declare that you enter Room 13 entirely at your own risk, that the Circle accepts no liability for anything that follows you home, and that nobody promises you will leave unaltered. It signs off by explaining that the room was sealed in 2015, and that the Circle’s own rule against reopening what has been closed is suspended for this occasion only. If this is the kind of creativity AI is supposed to threaten, I for one welcome our new robot overlords.

The bureaucracy doesn’t stop there. An Account of Experience form asks you to document your most recent brush with the paranormal (when, where, what you saw, heard or felt, and for how long) and then share it with fellow members. My fellow members kept their encounters firmly to themselves. Around the antechamber, photographs of the blaze and artwork inspired by it recall the horrors of Friday 13 March 2015, visions more ominous than anything that follows.

At the appointed time, groups of around eight are gathered and led up into the belly of the BAC. We are urged to keep quiet on the way. This is not for fear of alerting unseen demons with a taste for human flesh, but because the corridor runs past the Grand Hall, where another show is in full swing. At the end of the passageway lies Room 13, and once again we are earnestly informed how the room was found by venue staff and why it was locked away for everyone’s good. Quite why Health and Safety is letting anyone near this supposed danger to life and limb is never really explained.

Once inside the ill-fated chamber, each group is steered to a table. The decor is less chamber of horrors, more midnight in an Italian furniture shop: crepuscular lighting is broken only by barely-lit pendant lamps dangling inches above polished wooden tabletops. With an actor on hand as guide, each group works through a set of escape room-style lockboxes containing handsomely shaped MacGuffins. Once those are out on the table, the real spookiness begins…

After even more hacky lore connecting the dots between the fire at the BAC and the Circle of the Veil’s founding in 1666 (yes), things get darker - albeit mostly down to even light levels dipping even lower rather than any heavy happenings. There’s a jump scare or two. Unsettling sound adds an undercurrent of creepiness to the proceedings. All the while, the facial reactions around me range from the grimly intense to the utterly bored. Your mileage will vary on just how much pure terror floods your system. Frankly, I’ve seen scarier cheese sandwiches. 

As cliched as the storyline and setting seems, this production has an above-par pedigree. Writer Bells Prendergast and director, “conceiver” and Immersive Octopus founder Tom Maller have had a long professional partnership on Secret Cinema’s Romeo + Juliet and Blade Runner: The Final Cut (both 2018) and Casino Royale (2019). As part of the Immersive Anywhere team, Maller co-created the long-running The Great Gatsby Experience and directed Doctor Who: Time Fracture (winner of Broadway World’s Best Immersive Production in 2022 ahead of the recently-closed War of The Worlds and Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City).

This is a rare outing for Immersive Octopus without someone else’s brand to lean on and, weighed down by an uninspired script, the result is far from surefooted. This stumble is rescued to a small extent by beautifully understated work from Matt Farthing (sound) and Max Sharp (lighting), who do a great deal with very little. The BAC has a long and proud history of hosting world-class immersive productions — not least Punchdrunk’s seminal Masque Of The Red Death, the aforementioned Handle With Care and last year’s asses.masses — but maybe they should have left Room 13 sealed off.

Room 13 continues until 1 November.