The vaults of the Tower of London will be opened to the public for the first time in decades as part of an immersive experience pitching Londoners into the heart of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot.
Audiences will go down into the bowels of the building, which will be home to a purpose-built theatre space.
They will wear hi-tech headsets for a virtual reality boat trip down the Thames to Parliament, which Fawkes planned to blow up, before returning to the Tower where he was tortured until he named his fellow conspirators.
The 90-minute show uses actors, special effects and VR to recreate the London of 1605, with the audience tasked with infiltrating the plot that is remembered annually on November 5.
Chief executive of VR firm Layered Reality Andrew McGuinness said the technology, alongside physically being in the Tower, meant that “when you’re stepping back into 1605, all of your senses are telling you that you’re there”.
He said: “Your eyes are seeing London as it was in 1605. You get the smells, you will see the Tower of London how it looked then, and you’ll go down the Thames and see it as it was at that time. That’s what makes it so magical.”
The plot, an attempt to restore the Catholic monarchy by killing King James I during the state opening of Parliament, was foiled when an anonymous letter was sent to a nobleman warning him to stay away from the ceremony.
Fawkes was found hiding in Parliament with enough gunpowder to blow it sky-high and he was eventually executed along with some of his fellow plotters.
Mr McGuinness said the show, which opens in May and is created by theatre professionals and staff from Historic Royal Palaces, was a “thrilling” way of learning more about the history behind the plot.
He said staging the show in the Tower itself was using the “source material of the story you’re stepping into” and gave it “greater integrity”.
Writer Danny Robins, whose Radio 4 series about the Battersea Poltergeist was a cult hit, said it was an “exciting way of doing theatre”.
He added: “I also feel like what we are delivering is an age-old classic story but we’re delivering it in an incredibly accessible, explosive, exciting, 21st-century way.
“It’s like somebody made a brilliant movie version of the Gunpowder Plot and it came to life around you and exploded in your face, with bits of Jacobean London flying at you.”
The Tower is one of London’s most popular visitor attractions. About five million people are thought to have visited the site in 2014 to see its moat filled with 888,246 ceramic poppies to mark the centenary of the First World War.
