What does it take to be good?
What makes us human?
What really happened at the Savoy?
The tradition of gothic storytelling continues, in the heart of Hampstead.Welcome to Dark Matters at the Circle & Star.
Julia Pagett’s darkly funny new play — Lucas, Felicity, an affair, and a front desk in the afterlife where some mistakes do not end when life does. Directed by Andrew Hollingworth.
Madeline Smith is guide and narrator through Mary Shelley’s 1818 story, with a new soundtrack by Jason Frederick performed live to picture.
A lost operetta — one disastrous Savoy preview, a leopard with teething problems, a candle — surfaces at last, so the story goes. 85 minutes including an interval. Under-18s welcome.
Doors open thirty minutes before the time on your ticket. The ticket time is the start.
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. Three works across nine October days — 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?
A unique multimedia performance of Mary Shelley’s 1818 story — an interactive trip through its world, and into the warning of Prometheus. 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, reading extracts from Shelley’s text, while the composer Jason Frederick performs a new original soundtrack live to picture, in real time, to underline and support the story. Projection, lighting and smoke move with the music. 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
All copies of the script by Gilbert and operetta score by Sullivan, for their adaptation of Stoker’s novel, had been believed to be destroyed after its single disastrous preview performance at the Savoy Theatre in February 1898 — an evening involving a leopard with teething problems and a candle. However, a single surviving copy was recently found in the effects of the late antiquarian book expert, Sir Hubert Myar. Musical maestro Mitch Benn is delighted to present this adapted version, staged with sincere and enduring apologies to the surviving family and estate of both W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan. Matinee and evening on each of the two days; running time 85 minutes, including an interval.
Stoker set his horror on this Heath. Shelley stayed on it. The Observatory still looks into the dark from the top of the hill — and fifty-five seats wait at the bottom.
In Stoker’s Dracula, Van Helsing’s party dines here before going out onto the Heath after dark — where the Westminster Gazette has been reporting “The Hampstead Horror”.
On Lower Terrace, open to the public since April 1910 — the hill’s own telescope, pointed at the dark.
Mary Shelley stays with Leigh and Marianne Hunt early in 1817, Frankenstein still unfinished in her hands.
Circle & Star. Fifty-five seats, at the bottom of the hill — where a couple meets a front desk in the afterlife.
The deepest platforms on the Underground. Come up.
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.