I’ve written on and off about theatre in Cambridge for nearly three years now, and if there’s one boring drum I’ve liked to bang over and over again it’s a lack of innovation round here. Where’s the weirdness and the thrill in the 50 show-a-term diet of Chekhov and Stoppard and Pinter? The sense that we are really a university theatre scene? Now it’s self-flattery to claim to detect any long-term changes when you’re only here so briefly, but perhaps I’m sensing a change in the air. 

With the gravitational pull of the ADC, a big, professionally equipped theatre with plenty of performance slots and high visibility, it’s a very active decision for any of our experienced theatre hands to go elsewhere for their projects. And yet they have. We had the King’s Chapel-set Spanish Tragedy last term, and the tiny-capacity Bedroom Exercise this term in the Larkum studio –   productions that actively revelled in their unusual spaces, making the audiences feel the chill of stone or the warmth of the home, taking them out of their comfort zone.

So now we have the Paradise Project, which, I am pleased to say, delivers on its promise of ever-expanding space, physically and creatively, for drama in Cambridge. This town can at times seem like nothing more than a collection of empty rooms waiting to be filled up  - supervision rooms, lecture halls, rehearsal spaces, boardrooms, squash courts, chapels and cellars. Peter Brook told us that all that you really need for theatre to happen is an empty space, leaving Cambridge a town full of theatres-in-waiting. Director Emma Stirling has taken one such space, the Jesus Forum, a vast white-walled warehouse that could be anywhere in the world, and turned it into the terrifying home of a cult.

You may well be wondering what exactly this performance is. It’s difficult to review, partly because there is simply nothing to compare it against in Cambridge, partly because every audience member will have a different experience, and partly because every night will be different. So an account of my experience will have to suffice. Having met at a pre-arranged point outside the Forum, you are taken inside by cultist “John King” to meet other members of “Exodus”, given a boiler suit to wear over your clothes, and brought with the group into the echoing space of the Forum. King is played by a Matt Clayton who has really never been better: chillingly plausible, friendly but with the kind of dead steel beneath the eyes that is only brought to the surface when he physically bundles you out of the room for your nonconformity. The arrival of Ed Eustace as the cult leader opens the performance proper: it seems there are struggles within the cult, and the leader’s endless mouthing of meaningless New Age life-affirming slogans is not having the desired effect on everyone.

The characters emerge from amongst the audience; anyone could be an actor, and we are kept on our toes throughout. There is a central storyline, involving a skeptical husband trying to get his emotionally wounded wife back from the clutches of groupthink; but while the writing is perfectly good in its own way, it is the details that make it a compelling experience. Little glimpses round a corner that no other audience member could get, the cast’s whip-smart reactions to the audience’s deviation from the script, the tiny piece of paper you manage to pick up that gives you a wildly different idea of the backstory, missed by the rest of the viewers – these are the delights of immersive theatre well-done. While the appeal to the child-like imagination in all of us is well-deployed, the temptation to make the whole thing a series of tricks and scary noises off is avoided – it is not a haunted house, but a proper piece of theatre with a message to give about groupthink and spiritual emptiness.

This is impressive given there is no tradition of this sort of stuff in Cambridge. Given that fact, it is not surprising that the acting is not yet quite adapted to space: still too theatrical, the lines too clearly from a script in places. Eustace, however, gives a great performance, his trademark rhythms and manic emphases making more sense for this character than for any other I’ve seen him play. His is a nuanced portrait of power gone mad I was genuinely scared by. At one point he made us all drink a blue liquid; I exchanged nervous glances  with my fellow audience members, secretly wondering, ‘Is Ed Eustace mad enough to poison 20 people? Is there a feasible way he could get away with this?’ When it turns out to be Powerade, we all feel stupid, of course. The power of theatre has always been greatest for me when it turns you back to a wide-eyed child.

Excellent work all round then, from the whole team. There are doubtless plenty of flaws in the piece, but I’m willing to ignore them in awe of the ambition. To all theatre-makers in Cambridge – remember that theatre doesn’t just happen in the theatre, it happens in every human interaction. And that every empty space in this town is another stage waiting for a drama to take place.