Abstract
This chapter considers the oddness of secrecy’s prominence in contemporary theatre marketing strategies that flaunt secrecy as a trope: for instance, in the recent campaigns of several London-based companies including the Lyric Hammersmith’s Secret Theatre Company, Secret Theatre London, and Secret Cinema. It also considers the incorporation of secrecy in the design of frameworks for audience immersion and participation in fairly recent work by Punchdrunk and Coney that encourage audiences to discover a performance’s hidden depths through physically explorative participation (Punchdrunk), or covert forms of participation that are meant to go unnoticed (Coney). Both of these areas – the economics and aesthetics of secrecy – inform the production and reception of work by Secret Cinema, especially, which pulls focus in this chapter. Secret Cinema makes live immersive theatre performances of films that are unknown in advance of a screening that appends each show. Audiences are encouraged to advertise the performance in advance of going by telling others to ‘tell no one’ about it on social media, and they are prompted to figure out the film’s identity by engaging with clues and procedures for participation that are inscribed in a marketing strategy and embedded within immersive environments. Drawing on sociological and psychological studies of secrecy, Erving Goffman’s concept of ‘keying’, and recent scholarship on audience participation and immersion, the chapter explores notions of audience inclusivity and exclusivity in work by Secret Cinema and how these notions are informed by a framework for audience participation and immersion that ties in with the economic uses of secrecy. I argue that the kind of secrecy at stake is a paradoxically spectacular and commodified secrecy in a contemporary twist on the secret society, complicating the binding of secrecy to polarised notions of inclusivity and exclusivity, inclusion and exclusion.