Not darkness for shock — darkness for clarity. The kind that strips away the noise and leaves only the voice, the sound, the presence in the room.
Dark Matters is a season of modern-gothic performance at Circle & Star. Five works across one October fortnight — narrated, sung and spoken — drawn from the literature and music that live in the shadow of our imagination.
Love, guilt and the afterlife collide in a darkly funny psychological horror. Married couple Lucas and Felicity spiral through infidelity, resentment and longing — only to find that some mistakes do not end when life does. A booze-soaked satire of modern love curdles into a surreal nightmare of bureaucratic receptionists and unsettling strangers, where hell is not fire and brimstone but being trapped forever with the consequences of who we really are. What if being “good” was the hardest thing of all?
The monster could speak — cinema just never let him. An interactive trip through the world of Mary Shelley’s classic story: James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) plays on a hundred-inch screen while an original soundtrack is performed live to picture by the composer Jason Frederick, and Gothic screen legend Madeline Smith (Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, Bond’s Live and Let Die) is your guide and narrator, leading us into the warning of Prometheus. Projection and lighting move with the film; smoke moves through the dark. A horror happening, in the gothic splendour of an October evening.
Artwork by Scott Neilson · a signed, numbered edition of 55 — profit to nurses and local organisations supporting cancer patients and their families
Dark song. Torch song. The music that arrives after midnight. Lenny Beige draws the season to a close — the deeper end of the repertoire, by candlelight, on the one night the veil is thin.
A reserved front-row seat at every Dark Matters work — Dracula, Just be a good person, Frankenstein, Kidnapped and Dark Beige — on a single membership card you carry through the season. Show it on the door; we do the rest. Ten passes only.
Fifty-five seats. No distance.
The dark is the point.
28 Heath Street, Hampstead, London NW3 6TE. Hampstead station, Northern line — thirty seconds from the door. Fifty-five seats. Every one close.
Always the right temperature. Warm and cool on demand — fully climate-controlled, whatever the night does outside.
Thirty seconds from Hampstead Tube. Northern line, straight to the door.
Phones away. Once the lights go down, the room belongs to the dark.
A theatre, not a room above a pub. A private entrance, West End-quality sound and lighting, private and secure bathrooms — and fifty-five seats, every one close.