Titanic the ‘immersive’ exhibition: What’s next, 9/11 the experience?
The Legend of the Titanic | Dock X | ★★☆☆☆
London these days is chock-a-block with “immersive” experiences promising to transport us from the drivel of our everyday lives into more exciting, farflung worlds. But do you know one place I don’t want to be flung to? The Titanic, that ship that quite famously sunk in 1912, resulting in around 1,500 deaths. Yet this is exactly the promise of London’s latest immersive extravaganza just docked in Canada Water, The Legend of the Titanic, which promises to “bring the ship’s story to life like never before” through 360º projections, VR and Metaverse experiences so “you can relive Titanic’s legendary voyage”. Yep, that is sinking included.
Mind my high horse but have we actually all gone mad? I don’t know if it’s connected to the rise of true crime or our modern-day obsession with being the main character, but surely none of us want to feel like we were on board that ill-fated ship?
Inside the Titanic exhibition
The exhibition starts anodyne. You’ll shuffle through a couple of exhibition rooms showcasing wares from RMS Olympic (the sister ship of the Titanic; the exhibition contains no artefacts from the Titanic itself) mixed in fairly arbitrarily with a couple of props from the film. The signage reads like Wikipedia, complete with a couple of typos, but so far so what. That’s until you get to the “immersive stuff”.
The 360º projection room, the kind now popular for those art exhibitions you can let your kids run around in, places you in the hull of the Titanic itself on its maiden voyage, where the fictional story of two passengers, a father and daughter on their way to reunite with the mother in the US, plays out around you. The visuals are striking and there’s a beauty to gazing out at the sea as you join the passengers boarding the ship. But hold on – we know how this story ends.
After a cutesy playthrough of the father chasing his mischievous little girl through the ship, things turn sour. In the projected room, the ship starts filling with water to cinematic music as you perch on a cushion in the midst. I’m not saying it felt like it was real, or that I was afraid, rather the whole thing felt bizarre, maybe even a little camp? As the ship fades away you’re plunged into the ocean, where furniture from the wreckage floats hauntingly around the room. No dead bodies, of course, that would be distasteful.
Predictably, our little girl and her father are among the survivors. As we watch them sail away in one of the lifeboats, the little girl turns to her father and wistfully asks: “But Pa, what will happen to the others?” In the midst of a family friendly experience cash-in, this isn’t the time for hard truths. “They’ll find a way,” he replies. Hmm…
Anyhoo, saunter out and there’s immediately an ‘avoid the iceberg’ computer game to take the edge off, followed by a Jack and Rose I’m flying photo op (see above).
Cool tech can’t save this shipwreck
Next is the VR stuff which, for all this exhibition’s faults, is actually pretty cool. Equipped with a VR headset, the Metaverse room allows you to roam free through the ship with incredible detail and genuinely impressive technology. After walking through cabins, dining rooms, the engine room and finally climbing onto the deck, it’s an uncanny feeling when you get to the end and realise you’re in the same room you started in. What I could do without, however, was the opening gambit, in which you’re transported to the wreckage of the Titanic via VR sub. “This one won’t implode!” the guide’s voice reassures in an aside which comes off rather uncomfortably in light of the actual implosion of the Titan submersible in 2023.
There is reference throughout the exhibition to the actual stories of the real people on board the Titanic, but the nods to their memory feels cursory in comparison with the immersive, fun-day-out marketing that this exhibition is pedalling. Is it meant to be moving? If it is, I can’t say I left with any more insight into the tragedy than I had before entering. On the contrary, the storytelling is highly sanitised. While one of the opening info boards lauds the vessel as a great leveller, the death toll stats squeezed onto a wall at the end, showing the stark disparity in survival rate between the classes (76 per cent of third class passengers perished on board the ship, compared to 39 per cent of first class passengers), makes all too clear the elements of the voyage the exhibition has glossed over.
That these stats are there to find in the exhibition is not enough; the tone of the whole thing is off. A memorial board does stand tall at the end, inscribed with the names of all the victims of that tragic night, but any impact is quickly dissipated as you turn by it to get to the gift shop, where postcards with cartoon sinking Titanics and whistles to attract attention are available as souvenirs (that’s not a joke). When the makers of the exhibition spoke at the canape reception on launch night, the messaging wasn’t commemorative, it was corporate, as they reeled off how many immersive exhibitions they’ve managed to pump out this year. Some grandchildren of real survivors were there in the audience, and I’d be interested to know what they thought.
Perhaps part of the problem is that our memory of the real-life events of the Titanic have been so merged with the film version. It’s a blurring of fact and fiction that has allowed us to forget the actual tragedy at the heart of the story, while also enabling companies to capitalise on its commercial potential. There are similar conversations being had around Jack the Ripper tours, increasingly seen as off colour, while London Dungeons’ new “torturer’s chamber” experience perhaps also deserves some examination.
Then again, perhaps I’m just being overly sensitive. Hasn’t enough time passed? If so, good luck to our grandchildren off to 9/11: The Immersive Experience in a hundred years time.