Operation Black Door review - a glimpse of the future for Museum Lates?
For you if:
You like Museum Lates and want one with a bit of a difference
You like immersive and interactive exhibitions
Not for you if:
You’re after a full on theatrical narrative experience
To me, a museum like Churchill War Rooms getting into the immersive experience game is truly exciting. Being able to walk the actual halls in which some of the biggest decisions in WW2 were made and relive the stories is a really compelling proposition.
Operation Black Door was not quite a ‘walk-through-the-story’ theatrical experience that I had envisaged, I would describe it more as an immersive exhibition, focused on exposing you to the real story and supporting artefacts, told with interactive elements. Its components; the setting, the acting, and supporting app were all excellent individually. What the production didn’t quite manage to do was to pull these together into something more.
To me, the main issue was that for a show that was only an hour long, there were a lot of concepts and a lot of exposition. Bookending the experience, we are in a sci-fi alternate reality in which there’s a mysterious organisation called “The Department”, that enables us to go back in time to collect “echoes”. Also there’s an app with an AI sentient being called “C.I.G.G.I.E” that will guide us through the experience, which has its own learning curve. Phew!
This overhead meant that the main experience we signed up for back in the 1940s, comprised of four simple missions that uncovered the history layers in detective-style reveals, felt extremely short. This was a shame because the interactions with the actors (numbering two) and acted story passage (numbering one) were excellent. The former included a flawless spy moment with a drunken Major which was executed perfectly and made us feel really clever, the latter was hilariously acted by an Intelligences comedy duo that really brought us into the decision making process.
From a tech perspective, the app was probably the best I’ve used in an immersive experience thus far and impressive in its use of AR. On occasion it distracted from the real world but overall did a good job of shepherding us around, giving us our activities and a bit of extra information.
After no more than half an hour though, that was kind of it. Back to The Department, back to the future, back outside blinking in the summer evening light.
It was a great start, but there just needed to be more of it in one way or another in order to warrant a premium £35 ticket price. There are probably a few ways of doing this quite easily, for example being given access to more of the pathways rather than one of the five available or opening up some of the museum to free roam around in the style of a classic museum late (this wasn’t on offer and definitely felt like a missed trick). Of course, they could also rework the narrative so that there was less exposition, more of a narrative arc and perhaps more audience agency rather than being given information to consume fairly passively, but to be fair I’m not sure that that was what the creators were necessarily trying to achieve.
While it might not have given me the lofty experience I had envisaged, I applaud the effort by Wet Picnic and Imperial War Museums for the first attempt that I know of to pull something off like this as a Museum Late. It felt new and ambitious, even if it didn’t quite stick the landing.
Operation Black Door is next on 22, 23, 24 September, tickets are £35 and available here
