A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor).
And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun.
As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Anywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly).
It’s such a rock-solid conceit that it could be made less slick and it would still be fun. The Traitors is basically a variant on the games Mafia/Werewolf/Among Us (none of which take three weeks) and the thrill is in the psychology of it all: overanalysing everyone else’s behaviour and body language as we complete a series of puzzles and the number of contestants is whittled down via the murderous choices of the designated traitors plus regular elimination votes.
It’s possible to be eliminated relatively early, and clearly this is something you should be prepared for. Rather than being booted out of the building, ejectees are set up in a comfy room – decorated in a Traitors style – with screens relaying the rest of the game live, and a couple of tasks to complete which I won’t spoil. I enjoyed my time there - I’d lasted reasonably long and was with a group of friends who were having fun commentating on the action (I entered just as a colleague was vociferously declaring another contestant to be ‘a snake’).
My only major criticism is that the show is predicated on the traitors being totally silent when doing their treachery. After getting tapped on the shoulder I had to raise the blindfold goggles we’d been issued and communicate with the other traitor via gesture, which doesn’t sound noisy but bear in mind there were people sat just a foot or two away from me on either side. I don’t think I was caught on these grounds, but ‘rustling’ did come up as a reason for voting for people and it feels like a flaw. If you’re a traitor, be very, very quiet.
Overall: it’s a bloody good laugh. The secret is that it’s based on other games that have very good fundamentals. The Traitors Live Experience offers a glossy, accessible way to play what is essentially Mafia, that doesn’t at all require you to have seen the TV show, but clearly gains from its stardust. You could of course play a game of Mafia at home, but the bells, whistles and strangers in your group really do elevate the Live Experience into something more than a cynical tie-ie.
