Want To Visit Shawshank ?

Want to visit Shawshank prison?  Want to be part of the story?  It's in London.  Really!  (Bet ya didn't know Shawshank prison is in London.)

It's part of Secret Cinema's unique presentation.  The theater not only shows the movie, it moves you into the era and surroundings.  Nick Curtis gives this explanation, saying it is "an immersive experience that builds the world of the film around its audience, elevating them from spectators to enthralled participants."

Their youtube video simply says, "Secret Cinema presents Frank Darabont's 'The Shawshank Redemption' at the Cardinal Pole School, East London."

Here is Curtis' description of the Shawshank experience in November:

In November I attended Secret Cinema’s screening of Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. After signing up online, I was issued with a new identity, Hal Wood, by the ‘State of Oak Hampton’ and told to report to Bethnal Green Library one Sunday evening. There were obscure clues to the film’s identity (I thought it was 12 Angry Men), hints that 1940s-style men’s suits would be suitable apparel, under which guests should wear long johns and a T-shirt, for reasons that later became apparent. 

In a chilly hall I was sent down for bigamy by a judge, and covertly sold a £20 ‘library ticket’ by my lawyer to buy privileges — food and drink — in prison. Then I and 400 others were driven in vintage coaches to ‘Shawshank’ — in fact, the forbidding former Cardinal Pole Lower School building by Victoria Park. Inmates banged on the van and shouted sexual taunts as we spilled into the yard: ‘Hey, Dapper Dan, you wanna be my friend?’ 

We were herded into a hallway by yelling guards, told to strip to our underwear and put our clothes and possessions in numbered sacks that contained our prison uniforms. Then we were marched through showers where a naked man crouched, bleeding, on the floor, to cells where we were banged up. I got my first taste of the underground prison economy, swapping my ill-fitting trousers with a fellow guest: my second, when an actor inmate sold me a Jack Daniel’s miniature for a tick on my library card. He then exhorted us to chant ‘new fish, new fish’ at other prisoners shuffling along the corridor outside, until someone on the landing above broke down and cried, to lewd hoots and catcalls. 

This was the first of sundry scenarios from the film played out live, along with a hostage situation, a sudden surge of opera through the corridors, and an escape that led to us being put on lockdown in the gym, which is when the screening started. Mostly, though, it was about atmosphere as we drifted or were gently guided through the teeming life of the building. Some were taken to the work sheds to repair bicycles or brew beer (both sheds are run by local Hackney businesses), some were examined by a psychoanalyst (a real one, who works in prisons). There were work programmes — candle-making, cross-stitching, composing letters to imprisoned writers for the anti-censorship charity Pen — in rooms studded with quirky artworks assembled by Riggall under another offshoot brand, Secret Gallery. 

Those who had paid £100 for the Secret Restaurant package got to dress up as the governor’s guests for a three-course meal prepared by Alan Stewart and the catering/design company Blanch & Shock. I was smuggled a shin of beef in the school’s boiler room: delicious. For an extra £30, you could stay in the Secret Hotel — one of the shared ‘cells’ — and be further hectored overnight, followed by a yoga session in the exercise yard in the morning. In effect, you’d be paying to stay in a cell with four or five strangers, in a chilly former school, wearing either underwear or a uniform, before a PE lesson and breakfast in an institutional canteen. Surely only a dominatrix could better persuade people to collude in, and enjoy, their own discomfiture. 

But the level of detail and organisation in the building was extraordinary, the immersion an oddly nuanced process. No one broke character: Riggall tells me later that a bus broke down one night and the actor in charge frogmarched his ‘prisoners’ through the rain for 35 minutes, past boggling onlookers. The selling of drinks and snacks was conducted as if it were a black market. In a quiet moment I found myself shooting hoops in the yard with two strangers, exchanging nods like weary lifers. 

In the library I got talking to a German animator called Viv (she initially gave me her male, Shawshank, name) who has worked on a lot of live art events. ‘It’s extraordinary to corral and control this number of people in this big a space, and to be giving them booze at the same time,’ she said. ‘It should be a riot but it isn’t.’ For the guests there was an odd tension between the maintenance and subversion of the illusion. 

From Nick Curtis' article, "Secret Cinema: how to get 25,000 people to pay £50 for a film ticket, without knowing what the film is."  The full article is at www.standard.co.uk

--thanks to Micheal o'Reilly