Edinburgh Fringe 2025
Journey to the West
The Young Factory
Genre: Contemporary, Immersive, Theatre
Venue: Arthur Conan Doyle Centre
Festival: Edinburgh Fringe
Low Down
While seated in a chair blindfolded, this short 15-minute performance has you in an immersive hold as you are welcomed, jostled, interrupted and end up in some kind of dream. Technically simple with my performer playing all the parts and me taking each reminder in the spirit it was intended and the memory it creates.
Review
On arrival you fill in your ticket. Then you are asked to knock on a door where your guide shall ask you to put on your blindfold, then guide you into that room. Once in you put on the headphones, hold a controller, sit in a swivel seat and them we are off, until we arrive.
This is an experience designed to test your disorientated senses. It is an interesting musing on the way in which information is told to you, and you absorb that whilst physically having to deal with others in a confined space. Whilst your sight is blocked off, it doesn’t take long to realise just how much you rely upon it.
With only one other person in the room with you, it has an intimacy which does discombobulate you to a certain extent. Immersive experiences have continued to be a massive part of the Fringe and elsewhere testing your experience of the modern world. This blindfolded adventure concentrates upon sound and touch, on this occasion they had removed the scent, which was a bit of a shame because I felt this would have added something to it.
The audio quality is decent, telling the story of the flight and the people around you – obligatory child kicking your seta included at no extra cost – though it is being in a seat and being whirled around. Listening to instructions is fairly standard for this type of experience but what made this work was the innocent simplicity at its heart.
This is simply a story of somebody going on a flight from one place to another and people around them moving and getting up and out and you are touched and jostled whilst listening to the effect aurally but feeling the effect from the actor. It is familiar but at the same time disconcerting as the narrative then includes strange dreams that it’s suggesting you’re having which does not match the reality that you’re experiencing.
As a performance piece, this is relatively limited. However, as a moment in time during the festival, it does have a very decent role to play. You have time to contemplate a lot of fairly simplistic things, but what it does is introduce the idea in a busy life just exactly what it is that we class as important. There are no big issues and there’s nothing huge in terms of what it is that they’re asking you to contemplate, but the various connections of people round about you and strangers in your midst are given an opportunity to interrupt your peace and challenge your recollections and memories. It is a sensory adventure and one which I found pleasant, if not one that was going to rock my boat, even though the tug and turbulence on the plane was a little disconcerting.
