‘Spree’ Slays at the VAULT Festival (The NoPro Review)

Myriad Immersive lets us interrogate a killer

‘Spree’ Slays at the VAULT Festival (The NoPro Review)
All photos courtesy Myriad Immersive
I’m locked in a room with a murderer.

I’ve had five minutes of training, I’m wearing a wire and an earpiece, I’ve got a partner sitting next to me who’s just as inexperienced as I am, and we’re about to interrogate a serial killer face-to-face in the back of a shipping container. Our team outside the room is supposedly frantically scouring a stack of clues for material to ask about, but my attention is squarely focused on the handcuffs securing the man’s hands to the table and wondering how secure they are.

And then our commanding officer passes the key through the door and orders us to unlock them.

Spree is the latest in a long line of productions created by company Myriad Immersive. With heavyweight collaborative clients like Secret Cinema and Virgin Records for whom they’ve produced events for 500 guests per performance under their belt, a small-scale VAULT Festival production for only up to 5 participants at a time seems practically covert, given their resume.

The shipping container is small from the outside; once we enter it seems even smaller: the space has been partitioned off between the front and the back. The walls are covered in corkboards plastered with a haphazard sprawl of newspaper clippings, photographs, official documents, and handwritten notes. In the back section, through what we immediately assume to be a two-way mirror, we can see a man sitting calmly at a table, his fingertips playing over the metal handcuffs that belie his impatient state. A sharply dressed female federal agent with an even sharper tongue (portrayed by actor Charley Newton-John) welcomes us in with a crash course in our assignment: to coerce the previously-convicted prisoner to confess to yet another killing of a young woman.

With a runtime of only 20 minutes, I’m aware that we’ll need to work quickly; I begin to treat the performance like an escape room and immediately begin examining the evidence and trying to do quick math. I’m stalled: the murders took place in the late 1970’s and the suspect in front of us is at most 30 years old. I observe this to our handler who looks at me like I’ve got two heads and then informs me that the killings only happened a year or two ago. Aha, I was unaware that we had time-traveled back to the 70’s; I apologize for wasting time and she accepts it and moves on.

Two of us have been pre-selected to wear earpieces and sit in the room with the prisoner, while the other three are to remain in the antechamber and work through the clues and testimony we gather in order to pull a confession out of the target. We’re all given a few nondisclosure agreements to sign at this point — we haven’t seen them prior to arrival and given my recent experience in the mishandling of audience touch permissions at the VAULT Festival, I attempt to read the paperwork over. It looks like a lot of gibberish and lorem ipsum but I don’t have a chance to properly review it as the agent is rushing us through it, pushing us to hurry up and sign so we can get on with the interrogation. I sign a fake name for safety so we can move on, but now I’m on my guard.

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And then my partner and I are suddenly in the room, sitting across from a laser-eyed and smiling man. Played by the unnervingly confident Simon Grujich, he cuts an image that for all intents and purposes looks like every charming, well-groomed white male you see repeatedly in the long list of serial killer documentaries that currently glut the Netflix lineup. My pulse picks up as he begins to speak directly to us, asking us questions about ourselves. Our handler’s voice pipes in through the earpiece and encourages us to engage but not in too much detail. My partner and I offer general anecdotes to remain friendly, but as a series of photographs is passed through a slot below the mirror, our questions must become more and more pointed toward his crime. Our target becomes agitated and suspicious, and it is at this point that in an attempt to regain his trust the key is offered through the slot. Being the one sat closest to the key, I am tasked with unlocking him.

My heart is pounding.

I’m not a murder documentary enthusiast. I get squeamish at the sight of gore and have no interest in knowing how a killer’s mind works. This scene is so close-quartered and emotionally intimate and I feel so vulnerable that for the entire time we’re in with him I believe he is a threat. Once he’s free of his fetters I catch myself inching a little closer to the door and thinking of the closest weapon, the fastest way out. This direction of thinking becomes more prevalent as the prisoner’s testimony skews from the subtle to the eventually overt misogyny and his contempt for women (particularly the ones he’s killed). He actively tries to play my male colleague against me in an attempt to undermine my authority.

The script is very tolerant of clumsy audience interaction: there are points where our handler is consistently urging us to engage, at times ordering us to interrupt the suspect’s personal ramblings with more direct questions. Grujich deals with our occasionally bungling outbursts with artful replies and though I know in a real interrogation no suspect would stand for our level of nonsequiteur accusations, the experience feels smooth and highly polished. We’re never challenged for a misstep.

There is no touching from the cast in Spree, and while our speedy signatures on paperwork was integral to the eventual confession (the in-narrative use of official police documents we’ve actually signed was a notably effective touch), I still hold reservations about coercing audience members into signing their names to documents they aren’t allowed to review. Perhaps a setup where we’re encouraged to use (and therefore sign) professional aliases would be more suited.

Spree markets itself as being inspired by likes of the series Mindhunter and podcast Serial, and fans of this genre will enjoy the performance, particularly if they enjoy roleplay.

There’s plenty of space to play with the actors; I’m unsure as to if there are alternative endings and if our guided interrogation has any breathing room but I certainly felt like my contributions (and particularly my gender) had an effect on the delivery, and I suspect my partner felt the same way about his own. The set design is laudable for a short-term festival space; with just a purpose-built partition wall with a door and a mirrored window it hardly feels like a temporary space at all.

Personally I could have spent twice as long in the interrogation and still enjoyed myself. While the VAULT Festival run has now concluded one can only hope that Myriad Immersive will let their killer loose somewhere else in London sometime soon so that more hopeful investigators can get their chance to draw out a confession.


Spree has concluded.


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