'Bum Bum Train has proven to me that magic exists'
You Me Bum Bum Train tickets sell faster than Glastonbury, and the show has made people quit jobs - and marriages. One of their 20,000 volunteers reveals why it inspires such devotion
By Emily Jupp
You Me Bum Bum Train is back: the legendary Olivier award-winning immersive production, performed by thousands volunteers for just one audience member at a time, has returned to London after eight years. What exactly happens inside You Me Bum Bum Train stays inside You Me Bum Bum Train – everyone involved signs an NDA – but believe the hype: this show can prove life-changing for its ‘passengers’ and its volunteers alike. I’ve been both at previous iterations, and loved the experience so much that I’ve returned as a volunteer performer this time around, for 33 shows.
But to understand what a magical unicorn of a show You Me Bum Bum Train really is, you first need to know a bit about its founders, Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd.
Bond does not care about possessions. The only thing she collects are playing cards she finds on the street. “It’s really rewarding. When you find one, you feel like it’s a gift. It’s like winning the lottery”, she tells me, when I catch up with them both at the Soho Hotel.
For her fortieth birthday, Lloyd presented her with a carved wooden box he’d made out of oak, with the fast-food franchise Dallas Chicken logo in marquetry, because she reminds him of the chicken. On the inside, in mother-of-pearl, it says ‘Keep Going’, the duo’s mantra.
“I just bawled my eyes out when I saw it,” says Bond. It’s just the right size for her playing card collection.
Bond first met Lloyd at Freshers Week at University in Brighton and they were best friends almost from the start. “I think we were drawn to each other because I was also quite a bit of a renegade,” says Bond. “Lloyd was really rebellious, and I had loads of admiration for him.”
But after university finished they floated, dispersed. “I just felt really disconnected from life,” Lloyd recalls.
Then in 2004, working as a pot-washer in a restaurant, Bond was gifted some cash after her neighbour left it in her will. £20,000 – enough for a deposit on a flat. She was thrilled… but she had no plans to spend it on a house. “I can’t think of anything worse than owning my own home,” she tells me. “I hate permanency. It makes me feel like I want to take my jumper off.”
Instead, Bond decided to pay her fellow talented friends and art students to get together and make something amazing. She’d been drawing posters for something called a Bum Bum Train. She didn’t know what the train was exactly, or how much bum was really involved, but the You Me part – the bringing people together part – was crucial.
In its first version, some unsuspecting guest or ‘passenger’ would turn up in the basement of an old office block. Bond and Lloyd would push them around in a wheelchair through different scenes they’d cobbled together with their friends.
What you see in the show today, 20 years on, is an evolution of that original idea of bringing people into a world where they’ll have loads of different life experiences all at once. Except now, instead of constructing scenes from loo roll and paint, there’s a team of engineers, carpenters, labourers and electricians building the sets in meticulous detail across seven floors in a central London location, plus up to 20,000 volunteers making the scenes come to life.
Passengers now hurtle between short scenes via stairs, slides or other devices, before having to figure out on the spot how to behave in the different scenarios. There might be just one actor with them, representing anything from an authority figure to someone helping them to make a world-changing decision, or they might be faced with a vast crowd of people, all eagerly hanging on their every word. Then onto the next scene, and the next and the next, each one different, terrifying, relaxing, scary, disturbing, euphoric – till they’re tipped out at the bar at the end, breathless and struggling to process all the versions of themselves they’ve just witnessed.
I first went to You Me Bum Bum Train as a volunteer in 2015 for a show held in the Old Foyles Building on Charing Cross Road. I’ve been a fan of immersive theatre and secret pop-up events for decades and so I was curious about this large-scale show that no-one was allowed to speak about. I was also working as an editor on the arts desk of The Independent and thought volunteering would be a neat way to tell the story.
What I didn’t expect was to receive a ticket to be passenger after the piece had run. Because tickets to YMBBT are like gold dust. The most recent ballot sold out faster than Glastonbury tickets.
Boarding the Bum Bum Train as a passenger in 2015, I dutifully signed in and sat down in a dark, black-curtained waiting area. Next to me was Stephen Fry. He turned to me, shook my hand and said: “Hi, I’m Stephen”.
I smiled, wondering if this was already part of the show (it wasn’t), and then Stephen was called through a door. A couple of minutes later, I was told to enter too, down the rabbit hole and into the enchantment of Bum Bum World. I came out an hour later, breathless, exhilarated, and thrilled to be alive. Ruby Wax has said the show should be prescribed as a cure for depression and I agree. You can’t go through something like that without feeling like you can take on the world and win.
“Bum Bum Train has proven to me that magic exists,” says Bond and it does feel something like magic, when so many people are focused on giving one individual the ride of their life. Although – sorry! – you can’t get a ticket as a passenger for the current run, as it’s long been sold out. But you can still volunteer to appear in a scene…
There has, however, been a lot of criticism that the show is made on the back of free labour, something that is undeniably true. People doing a job should be paid. But from my own experience, volunteers get something out of it too. That might be just the aforementioned magic of the experience, but it might also be getting new skills for their CV; YMBBT will train you up in your chosen area and you can join with no prior experience. “Our training team is phenomenal, and it’s such a good learning ground for anyone who wants to learn how big productions work,” explains Bond.
It can even be the making of a career in producing, sound design, or other fields related to immersive shows. In 2011, Andy George – who would go on to found Vault festival – cut his teeth as their production manager, for instance. “He’d just finished a drama degree, and a year and a half later, he’s the leading production manager in immersive theatre in Europe,” recalls Lloyd. “There's so many experiences like that.”
The more you commit as a volunteer, the more you’re likely to get out of it – but the average time a person volunteers for is one and half shows each, with one or two nights of your time giving 2500+ people the ride of their lives (77 punters a night for 33 shows a night). Each ticket – £99 for this production – would cost around £6,000 if they paid all the volunteers. Economically, it just couldn’t work.
YMBBT is also a not-for-profit: once the show has broken even, surplus profits go to charity. Bond and Lloyd were both on the dole for 12 years while growing YMBBT, and while they now take a wage along with a handful of the production staff, there are no boards, no stakeholders, no year-on-year financial growth. They raise money from wealthy donors to pay the skilled workers who build the infrastructure and for supplies like paint, and then everything else runs on dreams and hope.
And Bond and Lloyd have both put the show above their own needs, at times. Lloyd had burnout for two years after the last show in 2015/16 ended: he has to make a million decisions about what YMBBT looks like – essentially holding the blueprint in his head – and it takes a toll. And Bond was even sectioned for three long weeks, after losing lucidity.
I ask whether Lloyd visited her. “Morgan was amazing,” she replies. “Yeah, he’s always been there for me when times are really tough. Like a superhero.”
“Of course, I’m honoured to be there for you,” he joins in. “You’re the kindest person I know, best friend I’ve ever had.”
“Do you know what?” adds Bond, “The best thing about having been mad is morphing back into sanity. It’s like you've been dropped at the bottom of the ocean and you’re alone with sharks for eternity, it feels like eternity. Then you swim away and the light comes...”
Bond doesn’t remember much from her time in the psychiatric hospital, but she bumped into a homeless woman recently who was in with her who said she was cracking jokes the whole time. She told Bond about a woman who approached her at lunch one day: “She said she was like, six foot something, an enormous beefcake lady. And she just slammed her fist on the table and she said, ‘I like eating pussy!’ in my face. I don’t remember this, but I turned around and I said, ‘I’m glad that you’re proud of your dietary requirements’. It’s funny to think that in psychosis, I’m just all about the jokes.’”
This time around, I’m back on the Bum Bum Train as a volunteer. And I’m happy to give my time for free, to let other people have the same life-enhancing experience I had as a passenger a decade ago.
After some rehearsals to develop my characters, in November last year I joined my first live scene, a really warm, loving break sandwiched between other action-packed chapters. It was only the second show night, so we had some test passengers come through and they were able to tell us what they thought. ‘Moving’ said one; ‘I didn’t realise how much I needed it,’ was another comment. It felt good that we’d made the passengers feel good.
During the process of volunteering, I’ve been keeping a diary of the experience. This was the note I made on the way home that day:
28 November
Watching the passengers’ facial expressions is wonderful. Some try to absorb every detail, some still reeling from the previous scene. Sometimes they look apprehensive, or scared. Sometimes the performer and extrovert comes out and they start running the scene and telling us what they want from us.
Then I went again, doing the same scene two days later, and got promoted to a role that required me to run the scene:
30 November
Gosh. I got promoted to an important role in my scene. I had watched another volunteer last time do this with poise and grace and I was not that. The role involved a bit of crowd control but also watching the timer to get the passenger out on time. Sometimes only ten seconds between passengers. It was the first ‘real’ show night. Everyone was on adrenalised high alert which was very much NOT the vibe of the scene, so it was hard to play that calm role while panicking under the surface…
The show itself is intense and fast-paced. So queuing up outside the building pre-show is the only time I get to chat to my fellow volunteers – and it’s fascinating to hear why they are willing to give up their time for this show. People are here for many different reasons, but a big one is that they were a passenger once, and want to volunteer to keep Bum Bum alive for others to experience it.
Athar Rashid, 55, one of my queue buddies, runs a property company. “It was a really fun experience to meet different people,” he says when I ask why he’s here. “It’s a bit like being 25 again. You know when you randomly bump into people on a night bus and chat to them when you’re young? Yeah, it’s like that.”
Carole Barnes, 64, is a holistic therapist; one of her clients told her about YMBBT. She was there “to see everyone’s expressions as the passengers go through. I’ve got an open mind. I’m hoping to meet nice people.”
There are stories of homeless guys starting new jobs, people finding the love of their life, changing career, or ending a stale marriage after volunteering with YMBBT. It can be transformative.
“I think sometimes the format of how we experience life is quite restrictive,” says Bond. “Once you take [that] away, people are able to be free and imaginative and full of possibility. Then once you’re in that state, you can ditch your wife that you’re not into, ditch your job you’re not into, move house, and realise that you can make these choices…”
To be frank, my life has not significantly changed by doing You Me Bum Bum Train – but volunteering has been a good experience. I mostly work alone, so just having a community around me a couple of nights a week felt really good. YMBBT is an antidote to the loneliness that is epidemic in our society: no volunteer is ever turned away. That’s another part of its magic.
As I’m walking along the platform to catch my train home from a show night, I catch sight of something under my feet, bright and clean against the manky floor. It’s a playing card. I pick it up. A four of diamonds. It feels lucky.
Register to volunteer for You Me Bum Bum Train here.
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I agree with you, the community is exceptional and as the effort and activities you contribute are entirely voluntary, it's about what you get out of giving your time and energy.
If you are there this evening, it would be lovely to say hi!