With the final performances of Rhythm&Ruse at The Vaults in Waterloo on the horizon, we sit down with Morgan Howson (Executive Producer) and Abigail Smith (Associate Producer) to discuss the conception and development of the show, the communities that have developed around The Starling, and the challenges that come with producing independent immersive theatre.
Photo: Rhythm&Ruse
Hi Morgan and Abi, thanks for speaking with us today. For those who haven’t yet visited The Starling, can you explain what Rhythm&Ruse is all about?
Morgan: I think the sentence we got to in the end was ‘Magic, music, cocktails, and conversation’. That came about through improv on stage, Sam [Booth] said it one night and it just stuck. The Starling is an underground club that you've been invited to, it's not a place where you can just get an invitation walking down the street. You enter through this kaleidoscopic corridor that separates the real world from the world we've created inside, which isn't the 1920s, but you're not in the now either. You're in this weird state of stasis, where you can't quite place the show and that's just how we want it. As guests come in and sit down they're serenaded by the incredible Naomi Banks, and our other singers, with a bunch of jazz and jazz recreations of modern pop songs as the evening progresses. Four of our secret society of magicians visit your table and showcase their sleight of hand throughout the show, and our society members visit you too to share some stories. Maybe they'll be giving a tarot reading, maybe they'll be taking you to one of the little back rooms or secret corners of the club to tell you a bit more about them and about what's going on, why you've been invited and the purpose of the gathering.
How did the initial idea for the show first come about?
Morgan: In December last year, Fania [Grigoriou] and I were sitting in a not-very-good cocktail bar in the middle of Chinatown spending £20 a drink on not-very-good cocktails while waiting to go to dinner. We were having a discussion about how experiences in London can be very poor value. You go to a bar, you have a few drinks, you spend £60 each, but you've not really got anything out of that, and it’s also not hugely communal. You're sitting at a table for two while there are all these other conversations and stories going on around you that you're not hugely aware of. We wondered if there could be a theatrical version of that night out where we could deliver value in buckets and we give people a good time, as well as encourage community.
Obviously Fania’s background is with Punchdrunk. When you think about those great show bars that Punchdrunk have created like Manderley at Sleep No More and Peep at The Burnt City, they became these gathering places with entertainment and a real sense of world and story. I think for a lot of people, particularly people who end up going to their shows a lot, those watering holes became such a core part of the experience.
While no reviewer is ever going to extol the benefits of spending a third of your time at the show sitting in Manderley and idly chit-chatting, it became a huge part of what makes those spaces feel like home. The question then became can that be a full-blown show? Can we build something that feels like it's a real world? A real immersive experience, that takes place in a cabaret club and includes drinks so it feels really good value for money.
I remember finishing the evening having had a lovely meal and going to another cocktail bar. We were quite drunk, and I remember thinking that maybe I wouldn't think of it again. My background is in product creation, mostly in the digital and tech sectors, and my curiosity got the better of me. Within a month the show existed on a spreadsheet. It was like ‘Oh here's how you could do it and here's how the numbers would potentially look’ and then we just grew it from there. A lot of people wanted to back it knowing the risks because immersive theatre is hugely risky, and independent theatre is hugely risky, but they wanted to help us to give it a go, so we sort of built we built off of that. But the idea literally started in a little bar in Chinatown on the eve of my birthday in the depths of winter last year, which is very quick for an immersive show like this.
Abi, how did the two of you first meet and what was your reaction to the concept that Morgan and Fania had when you first heard it?
Abigail: Well, I first met Morgan after she came to an event I put on four or five years ago through my TikTok. We kept this little friendship going where we would go out for dinner once a month. I would tell her all the drama that's going on in my life and she would tell me what an idiot I am. Because I had built this community, and as Morgan said, so much of this show is about community building and about creating a communal feeling, which is something I’d done via social media, she approached me and said ‘I want to make this show’. I was like ‘Babe, you work in tech. What are you talking about?’. Like so many people, my initial reaction was 'Who would want to do a magic show?'. She explained it to me more, and I then went ‘Oh no, actually that sounds amazing’. There’s a perception of magic that it's not cool or sexy.
Morgan: Like it's a children’s birthday party kind of thing...
Abigail: Yeah, children’s birthdays and weddings... there's a perception that it's an annoying guy who comes to your table while you're just trying to have some champagne, but when we talked more about the show and the idea of it having an Alastair Crowley-style secret society of the occult to it, I thought it sounded really cool. This woman - she’s honestly a mastermind in making things sound amazing.
With that initial concept developed, you then approached Sam Booth and Mallory Gracenin who helped devise the show. How far into the process were you before they became a part of the project?
Morgan: I'd say we had a framework. We knew roughly what we needed the show to look like to make it work operationally. What people forget when you're building a concept like this is you're not just building a show, you're also effectively opening a bar, and have to figure out all those service windows and things like that as well. The full story and full concept were definitely fleshed out once we got them on board, and it's a dream team right? These are great powerhouse performers, really doing what they do best and being given the opportunity to do that in such an intimate environment, as such a close-knit group and to move fast and develop fast. I’m really grateful for their decision to come on board and that happened very early on. Their names were attached during the funding process. I think the goal really was to demonstrate that we had the credibility to build an experience of this nature and then bring it to market.
Photo: Rhythm & Ruse
We created a place where it was okay to come as you were and to discover other people coming as they were as well.
After stepping through the doors of The Starling, I think it's fair to say the place has an inviting and friendly atmosphere. You mentioned earlier wanted to create a show with a sense of community. Can you tell us a bit about why it was so important to create a welcoming space?
Morgan: You've been to the show a couple times and have seen what happens. Yes, there is magic at our tables in terms of magicians performing, but I think there’s social magic there too in how people feel able to connect with others on a deeper level.
I've been in London for a decade now and I grew up in the North, I come from Scarborough in Yorkshire. In Yorkshire, you see someone on the street and they say hello, and you say 'How’s your day going?', you have a little chat. You get in a lift going from floor one to floor fifty and you have a conversation. The thing that is starkest to me about London is the lack of community, and the lack of conversation. You can go through, and I did go through when I was living alone, weeks where you've not talked to another human being. Particularly over the pandemic when we were just talking to screens. I think a big part of what we wanted to accomplish with Rhythm&Ruse, is a true sense of community and a sense of belonging for people who visited our tables.
I think that's been created with such brilliance by our creative team because you have to have the right environment to do that. It has to feel intimate enough. Our set designer, Issy, did such a great job of making those tables feel intimate and warm. Skylar, our lighting designer also made sure that people are lit enough to talk, but not too lit, so it feels like a confessional where you can say whatever you want and you can communicate with others and not feel too self-conscious about it. The inebriation provided by our guest services team helps that too, but there's a sense that you're in a world of possibility where anything can happen, I think it really opens people up to the experience of getting to know each other. We created a place where it was okay to come as you were and to discover other people coming as they were as well.
The show’s got a huge revolving cast of magicians. What was it like trying to assemble that group? Did you find yourself getting sick of card tricks?
Morgan: I tell you what, one of the weirdest experiences of my life will be conducting interviews with magicians in a WeWork on a Saturday afternoon. We had a huge amount of interest from a whole bunch of magicians, but the one thing that was really important to us was that our cast reflected the world. I think magic is a profession that is 97/98% cis white men and it's quite easy to fall into the trap of only casting cis white men.
As a trans woman, I believe very vehemently that you can't be what you can't see. I transitioned fairly later in life because you figure out who you are once you see other people doing it. Obviously, this is not the same thing, but if you're an aspiring female magician or you're an aspiring Southeast Asian magician, I think it's so important that you can see people like you getting opportunities and working in a professional environment for an audience.
Our magicians I think do our show for the love of magic. There's a reality that no producer can pay a close-up magician what they would get for a wedding or a corporate booking, because magic, like many self-employed professions, is one where you get three days of work a month, but the three days that you get work are big paydays, then you spend the other 27 days trying to find work. That is the standard.
Magicians don't get as often as they would like the opportunity to perform close-up. When you ask most of the magicians we have what their favourite kind of magic is, they'll say close-up, but there’s no environment in which to perform close-up magic. We set out to create an environment that let magicians do the thing they want to do in as near to optimal conditions as you can get economically in terms of giving them the right sight lines, casting the light in the right way against the tables so what is seen is seen and what shouldn't be seen remains unseen. Also, we've created an environment where they can work with other magicians, which is so rare, because being a magician is a hugely solitary profession. Other than catching up at The Magic Circle, most magicians work alone and are booked alone. Every night for the past three months, for us to have had eight magicians in a room together performing as a team and networking and communicating with each other, that's a really big deal.
Abigail: It's so cool seeing them all backstage. One of them will come in and go ‘I'm gonna do something new tonight’ and everyone goes crazy and they all nerd out together. You’ll be walking backstage and you’ll just see people levitating things and people slicing things into their head. You're just like ‘What's happening? Am I in a dream world?’
Photo: Rhythm & Ruse
Naomi Banks comes out and starts singing, suddenly everyone goes silent... In that moment I was like ‘Oh my god this show's amazing’.
What was it like having the doors of The Starling open for the first time and having guests enter?
Morgan: We call that first preview Black Thursday. I'll tell you why… there is a truism of immersive theatre, which is that as much as you prep and plan, you cannot know how it will go until you sit 192 people in 192 chairs and find out for yourself. What we quickly found out is that trying to get 192 people to read a 12-page menu and make drink choices in a very quick and very dimly lit environment leads to service challenges.
The first night, my recollection of it was that I was running around like a crazy person and at some stage going into the bar and shouting, not in a negative way, but just shouting at our guest services manager Lois, who has done an incredible job, ‘Just put wine on the tables! Just put bottles of wine on the tables!'. Lois was going ‘Are you sure? I think we can recover this’ and I went ‘Nope. You cannot recover this. The oldest order in the system is from 40 minutes ago, just put wine on the tables!’.
That first night, I presume a show happened? My mind was mostly on the operational challenges. As I mentioned earlier, opening an immersive show is only partly about the show. We sat down, we regrouped and moved to the concept that you're familiar with, where we significantly cut down on choices and instead have this eclectic, ever-changing menu of alcoholic and non-alcoholic pairings as the show progresses, and that worked much much better. Thank goodness for that because otherwise, I worry we wouldn't have had any bar staff on the second night.
Abigail: Morgan came up to me because I jumped behind the bar, and she said ‘How are you?’ and I was like ‘I feel like I'm in a war’.
Morgan: Once we'd stabilised from that challenge, I think you feel an immense sense of pride. There are moments that were really important to me as the show was being built where I thought ‘This is going to be a really beautiful audience reaction moment’. The theatrical unveiling of the space after you get the welcome speech from our society members, you see the golden wings of The Starling. You see that, you see the room, you see Rosie sitting there writing her premonition ready for later in the evening. The moments where you're sitting at a table and the other side of the room is consuming magic, the lights are shining down on the tables, you look across and it feels a bit otherworldly on the other side of the room. I think it was little moments like that that told me we had made the right decisions and done the right things along the way, but you can only really see that with an audience.
Abi, any strong memories of seeing the show being performed in front of an audience for the first time?
Abigail: This is terrible of me, but I had never heard Naomi Banks sing until Rhythm&Ruse. Morgan was like ‘She's amazing, trust me, she's incredible’. The third preview we ever did was open to my TikTok audience only, so we had an audience of just the queers in for one night. It was such a great community atmosphere, it all felt very alive and vibrant in there. Naomi comes out and starts singing, suddenly everyone goes silent. What a voice! Where has that voice come from?! In that moment I was like ‘Oh my god this show's amazing’. I've seen the show many times now and every time she sings I think ‘Oh my god. A siren walks among us.’
Morgan: You start to see flash points and moments as you're wandering around the space. There's a rhythm to it that you start to feel, which is a privilege to be able to experience. There's a lot of joy in that, knowing the pace of the show. When you're actually sitting watching it I think it goes so fast it doesn't feel like a two-hour-long experience because there is always some kind of stimuli.
Photo: Rhythm&Ruse
Some people latch on straight away to what we're going for, some people have no idea what's going to hit them.
I'd love to dig a bit deeper into the occult elements that are bubbling under the surface of Rhythm&Ruse. There are a lot of bird references within the show. 'The flock' is mentioned a lot by Tom and Rosie on stage, and the club is of course called The Starling. Can you tell us about why these elements were all integrated into the show?
Morgan: It's always interesting isn't it, to have something brewing under the surface even if it doesn't really matter what it is? It's nice to have that sense of layers in the piece. It was really important to Fania and the team to build a sense that there was something else going on. A lot of the themes that you mentioned are explored in the more private intimate moments of the show - they're explored in 1:1s and they're explored at the tables. To some extent, that's how we wanted it because 97% of people are there for an evening of magic and music and fun. If you overwhelm them with story, it can detract from that, particularly if they're four drinks in, so it's a delicate balancing act. Our goal at least for this initial season of The Starling was to do our best to hit that balance and to not go too far in the other direction.
I'm going to give you a funny story… the range of reactions you get are very diverse. Some people, like you, latch on straight away to what we're going for and maybe where our inspirations lie, some people have no idea what's going to hit them. There was a couple early in the run who were taken to one of our side rooms and invited to join the flock, which is an interaction that, as with all of our interactions, is scripted and ends in the same way regardless of what the audience member does or doesn't do.
These audience members were so surprised by the interaction to the point that they made an official complaint about the fact that perhaps our cast members were going ‘off book’ and were trying to convince them to go and do things with them after the show that we might consider to be unsavoury. They said the cast members should get a talking to. The next day I got an email in my personal email inbox, from a police officer. All it said was ‘Hi, we would like to talk to you regarding a potential crime. When can we call you?’. I had the back and forth with the police officer to arrange and schedule a time which was arranged for a couple of days after, and the whole time I was like ‘Am I going to have to explain the nature of immersive theatre to this police officer?'
Abigail: As if they were convinced we were soliciting sex in the middle of Waterloo!
Morgan: As it happens, the call was just about a phone that I'd had stolen from me several months prior, but for 48 hours, just because of the timing, I had the joy of game planning in my head what my official response would be to a police officer if I was asked if two of our cast members were indeed inviting people to some kind of unsavoury gathering which I had not approved of after the show.
Abigail: My favourite part of the complaint, there was an addendum at the end that said ‘If the request had been made outside of the show, perhaps afterwards, maybe my response would have been different’. So they were like ‘I maybe would have gone for the foursome had it not been during the show.'
Morgan: I think it speaks to the challenge of trying to produce a piece like this. Because people are coming in just expecting a fun night out with some magic and some music and cocktails, if you are too overt with that stuff it can be quite alienating and potentially even scary to your customers, so finding that balance has been something that I think Fania and the team have really had to reckon with. I think it is quite easy to go too far, particularly in an environment where we know that people would be somewhat inebriated.
That’s quite the reaction to a 1:1 scene…
Morgan: It demonstrates that the acting was very good!
It's probably the best review the cast could ever hope to receive.
Morgan: If people believe that they're actually being invited to an after-party, then clearly it was convincing...
Photo: Rhythm&Ruse
Alongside the main Rhythm&Ruse show, there was also a series of Rhythm&Ruse Lates performances in which The Starling was used as a more traditional cabaret venue. How did you go about finding acts that would be a good fit?
Abigail: I think we wanted to take a few risks on people. The Vaults as a venue was previously known for hosting really cool new writing and new performers. That space doesn’t exist as it once did, but as someone who grew up with new writing and found my feet in this industry with original new work, I wanted to create a space where people could explore that. We did a risk-free deal for people, we did a straight box office split, we paid for the techie, we paid for the tech time, and we helped them with marketing. I really wanted to create a space where it felt very equitable on that front so we could support cool new artists. We found some really fun drag queens, we had some great names like Elf Lyons, Flat and the Curves, and people who we knew would bring in a nice audience, but maybe wanted to try some new work. We went to the Edinburgh Fringe, went to see stuff all around London, and just looked for things that felt new, cool, and different.
Sadly we're now a couple weeks out from Rhythm&Ruse having its final performance. Can you tell us about the challenges of sustaining a show like Rhythm&Ruse in the current climate?
Morgan: It’s a hard market and it's been a very difficult year for all theatre, not just immersive. We saw what happened with Cake at The Other Palace and the early closure announced for Why Am I So Single? I think the reality is that there are a few different market forces at play. People are going out less, they spend less when they go out, and they are less likely to try new experiences if there isn't a brand name attached, maybe even less likely than ever before.
I think when you look at the range and diversity of immersive experiences in London, going from the escape room style immersive experiences like Monopoly and the Taskmaster experience to the narrative-driven experiences like Paddington, and even The London Dungeons, to the two magic concepts that are currently open in London and that would be considered immersive, there is a huge diversity of options for consumers in London right now. I think there is a possibility that we are starting to reach a stage where there are too many options. and where there's a lot of capacity for the market to support at a time when people are tightening their purse strings.
Something I’ve thought about a lot over the last few weeks is that technically, every time you open an immersive experience you're creating new capacity for theatre in London, often in places that wouldn't usually have any capacity for theatre, at a time when even our West End houses are struggling to fill. I think there are some incredible things out there, produced by hugely talented creative teams, and produced with clear intent and goals to deliver something sustainable, that unfortunately are just failing. Not to capture critical attention, not to capture audience attention in terms of the feedback that they receive, but just to capture enough audience consistently at a high enough price point to make theatre sustainable.
The vapid criticism of shows like The Manikins or The Key of Dreams is that the price points they are charging aren’t accessible, but the commercial reality is that this work is expensive to produce and if we want it, we have to support it, and we have to buy tickets. If we don't, it just becomes impossible to deliver.
It's very difficult for all theatre companies to get any kind of Arts Council Funding, but particularly so for immersive theatre. The risk is if as a community, and I'm speaking really as a consumer of immersive theatre now, as much as a producer, aren't able to pay sustainable prices and aren't willing to take a risk on things that don't have a brand name attached, it will lead to a homogenised version of immersive where everything is branded, everything is linked to some kind of existing IP or property, and producers will feel even less able to take risk.
You need small-scale commercial productions as a stepping stone from indie productions to get large-scale commercial productions right? This middle sector has to exist and has to be able to survive. At the moment it's just very difficult.
Photo: Rhythm & Ruse
You're not the first producers we've spoken to who have mentioned the lack of Arts Council funding available for immersive theatre.
Morgan: Arts Council funding or foundations and grant programs have an opportunity to fill the gap, but at the moment that funding is very directed towards conventional theatre. The way you have to build the business case is built around conventional theatre, and that's just not the reality for small-scale commercial immersive theatre which has a very different problem set and very different challenges associated with it. In many ways, this country is a birthplace of modern immersive theatre if you consider Punchdrunk to be the impetus of this industry, and I think it is a shame that the only commercial immersive theatre producer that doesn't rely on IP and that does seem to be able to get Arts Council Funding is Punchdrunk.
There are so many opportunities out there for different producers to build really exciting and interesting projects, and we just need apparatus to support them, wherever that might come from. The challenges are huge, not just in terms of getting an audience and getting to a price point but also in finding venues and building them in a cost-effective manner. There’s so many challenges in trying to produce really interesting stuff and very little support.
Abigail: I used to do conventional theatre and the first thing that everybody told you when you're getting advice about planning for funding is ‘Can you do it with fewer people?’ It's always ‘Can you halve the cast size?’. I was applying for a four-hander, and everyone was like ‘You’ve got to make it a two-hander. That’s the only way you’ll get funding for it'. There are some really cool immersive shows with tiny casts, but the vast majority will have chunky cast sizes to make it work. That's the beauty of it, isn't it? You get that 1:1 or 1:2 small-scale interaction that you’re just not going to get if you’re one of a thousand in an audience. Unfortunately, that does mean big cast sizes, it means big money needs to be invested, and big payrolls. There’s got to be some kind of flex when it comes to arts funding, and recognising the value that the immersive theatre industry has. Think about the incredible amounts of political art and groundbreaking stuff that could be done with this beautiful art form, that can’t always be done with your traditional proscenium set-up.
I wrote an immersive show about LGBTQ activism during the AIDS crisis, and I was very lucky to get some mentorship for it, but they were like ‘It's a beautiful show, but it’s unproduceable because you couldn't have a bar.' Unfortunately, that's the reality of it.
Morgan: I think the question ultimately becomes how do we bridge that gap? For every hugely ambitious independent immersive theatre project that fails, there's a bunch of investors that will be slightly more trepidatious next time, who might not be in a position to take the same risk.
Coming up against the reality of trying to produce independent immersive theatre in this current climate, would you say the experience has put you off producing more work in the future?
Morgan: We’ve brought together an incredible group of people that have done some really beautiful work. From our creative team to our magicians, our guest services team, our band, and everyone in between. We have built what feels like a real family and a real community behind the scenes as well as in front of them, and we brought people together who otherwise would never have met each other. Just as we've been forming connections in front of house, we’ve done the same in the back of house too, but this has been a challenge and that challenge has taken its toll not just on me, but on all of our people.
We've had to cut back our schedule, we've had to close earlier than we would have hoped, and all of these things have real-world consequences for the people that we have brought on this journey with us. I'm so grateful to those people for coming on this journey and producing something so brilliant for the thousands of people who have been able to see it. I'm so appreciative of their time and their talent and their patience, and I’m apologetic for the fact that not everything has been as smooth or as easy as perhaps we would have liked it.
All that being said, I wouldn't change anything about this experience. If I knew this was the end game, I would probably still be tempted to do it again. I think everything you do in life you learn lessons from, and every production, everything you deliver, and every product you bring to market, gives you an opportunity to make the next thing you do even better. A process like this is incredibly draining and challenging, but I remain very excited by the medium and very infused by the potential that I believe it has. I don't believe in closing doors all the way.
As with everything in life, at some stage, we turn on the lights and the party ends. We clean up the broken bottles and glasses and sweep up the pieces. I think it's raw and it’s difficult. It's been difficult for everyone on the team as we've come to terms with the last few weeks but it doesn't make any of us less proud of what we set out to accomplish, or less proud of what we built. I think there are lessons to be learned from the challenges people face along the way, just as much as there are lessons to be learned from the successes.
Too often we only hear about success, and in many ways, this production has been a success. It has been a critical success, it has brought people together, but we also have to acknowledge some of the challenges and that has to be okay, that has to be an acceptable part of the story that you tell about what you did.
Photo: Rhythm & Ruse
As we now approach the final performances of Rhythm&Ruse, looking back on the entire process of creating and mounting the show, what are you most proud of?
Morgan: I think if I had to give you one word it would be community. From the community that we built in our audience - both people coming back, and people exchanging Instagrams and saying they want to go get dinner together and things like that, I think is incredible. Secondly, the community that we have created backstage across our magicians, musicians and cast members. I think that's been an incredible thing too - it's people who wouldn't normally work together getting to come together to produce something really incredible. Thirdly, our investor community, who have also I think grown quite close to one another. The benefit of building a show this way and building it on investments from as little as £500 is that it distributes risk, which makes it easier to fund a project like this. It means that no one put in more money than they could afford to lose if it doesn't work out, but the benefit I wasn't expecting is that these people are friends now. They talk to each other about the show, and about their lives. There's a WhatsApp community that I have on mute because it moves too quickly.
Abigail: I specifically remember once, I said to the WhatsApp group ‘I'm really enjoying that we have an investor community where we can have dinner and then I can say to the investors ‘I have to go home to my super hot girlfriend’’. Everyone was very appreciative of that.
Thank you both for making the time to speak to me today. I'm sorry it's not under better circumstances, but I think there's a real value in being able to have a record of things like this, even if they don't work out as hoped. You should both be incredibly proud of what you created with Rhythm&Ruse, it'll be sorely missed.
Morgan: Thank you for having us. I think the reality is that the majority of theatre productions fail to make a return and that the default scenario for any production, and for any producer, is this one right? It ends hard and sometimes it ends messy. People who are thinking of doing work like this have to know that that's okay.
If you don't have people who are willing to take the risk, who are willing to stick their neck out, and who are willing to sometimes to be seen as the enemy when things go wrong, then you don't get new and challenging work, you just get the same simple cookie-cutter formulas, so I think it is important that people read and understand the realities of it because it sets them up better to do their own thing.
If you go in and all there is is unknown, or even worse if you go in and all you see is success, then it can be quite hard to reconcile your own experiences and figure out what you want to do. I think it's helpful to read a warts-and-all description of this stuff and understand some of the machinations behind the scenes, not just because it's interesting, but because I think it holds a lot of value.
To tie it back into the show, producers shouldn’t embrace the unknowing then?
Morgan: I think embrace unknowing but with context.
Rhythm&Ruse is booking until 23rd November 2024 at The Vaults. Tickets start at £17. To book and find out more, visit rhythmandruse.com
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