Or more fully “Gatwick on the Orient Express: A Musical Journey Through Systems, Identity and the Near Future”
It began as a joke — recreating the luxury of the Orient Express on the Gatwick Express, with velvet, jazz, and cocktails hurtling between Victoria and Brighton. But as I followed the original route from Paris to Istanbul on ordinary trains, passing through increasingly unstable regimes, the satire sharpened. Each border brought more surveillance, more unease. By Istanbul, where protests were being crushed and the mayor imprisoned, I knew the project needed to change.
The journey became something darker and more relevant — a performative, participatory experiment in identity, obedience, and systems of power. At UXCamp Brighton, I began prototyping this new vision: a musical, headphone-based game played by passengers in a real train carriage. The original idea of luxury shifted to something more allegorical, absurd, and unsettling.
Passengers are sorted into “tribes” — originally represented by nuts and metals, combining absurd bureaucracy with Uno-style gameplay. But now, something richer has emerged. Each tribe aligns with one voice part from a choir: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass. Each of these four groups contains two hidden polarities — left and right, inclusion and control, ecological idealism and technocratic urgency. While the choir sings in harmony, the underlying values are in tension. The train’s movement mirrors this tension as passengers discover that no tribe is pure, and harmony may be a performance.
The project now also functions as a time machine. Each station on the journey south represents a year — taking us from 2025 to 2035. As the years pass, authoritarianism creeps in. Instructions from the “Ministry of Direction” grow more controlling. The system seems stable — until it begins to fracture. The only escape at the end? Reconciliation. To pass the ticket barriers at Brighton, you must collaborate with a member of a different tribe. Division cannot continue.
Inspired by my involvement with the Urgent Optimists, this project is about exploring not just what could go wrong — but how we might come back together. Through play, music, and systems thinking, we simulate what polarisation feels like, and invite participants to rewrite the ending.
A train ride. A social experiment. A piece of immersive political theatre in motion.