Acting up
The theatre that comes to your living room
I’m throwing a typical summer lunch for three friends of cold chicken, salad and wine, with one unusual difference: a six-strong theatre company is performing a Noël Coward play in my south London living room, so close we could hurt ourselves on their cut-glass vowels.
Alongside our meal, we are sampling a new service cooked up by a trio of entrepreneurial, 30-something actors under the name Revels in Hand: bespoke, luxury, private theatrical experiences for the seriously wealthy, or just for middle-class theatre lovers who want something unique and “experiential” for a special occasion.
The average cost is £5,000, but the sky is the limit in terms of budget and imagination, and each show will be tailored to the setting. Through their existing production company Go People, the founders have already staged plays in private members’ clubs, at a holiday home in the Hamptons and on a polo field, and they’re busy preparing productions to suit a swimming pool and yacht.
The emphasis, they say, is on “joyfulness” – they’ve done Shakespeare and Molière comedies, as well as works by Coward and John Van Druten. In-jokes, dogs and even stage-struck children can be incorporated into the performance to give it a more personalised feel, and the company wants to commission plays from new writers that can be tailored or adapted to specific locations or groups of people.
As a former theatre critic, the whole idea sounded screamingly cringeworthy to me beforehand. But it turned out the domestic setting of the briskly witty Ways and Means – one of several short playlets that make up Coward’s Tonight at 8:30 – suited my house to a T. The combination of a relaxed lunch with intimate drama, lubricated by a few glasses of sauvignon blanc, proved hugely enjoyable, and my guests – a screenwriter and a very forthright regular theatregoer – loved it too.
Coward’s bickering toffs were played by Freddie Hutchins, 31, and Lucy Eaton, 30; Melanie Fullbrook, 29, played the maid and directed. The trio met on the theatre scene at Cambridge University, then went off to drama school at Guildhall, Bristol Old Vic and Lamda, respectively. They forged decent careers: Lucy has worked at the Old Vic and Donmar Warehouse; Mel has acted at Sheffield Theatres and directed at Theatre Royal Stratford East; Freddie recently co-produced a 48-venue live UK tour featuring the popular Cbeebies character Bing Bunny.
“But we all wanted to be more proactive, rather than sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring,” says Lucy. They formed Go People in 2013 and staged attention-grabbing productions on the London fringe – Daisy Pulls it Off, starring several soap and sitcom stars at the Park Theatre; A Midsummer Night’s Dream with only seven actors, including Freddie Fox, at Southwark Playhouse – but earned nothing from them. Maybe, they thought, there would be a way to adapt the lordly patronage of Shakespeare’s day to the modern world of aristocrats, oligarchs and other HNWIS (high networth individuals).
Though they aren’t quite as posh as they sound – that’s drama school training for you – the trio had plenty of connections to draw on. “Early on, Mel and I did private tuition to support our acting work,” says Lucy, “and we made a lot of good contacts with quite wealthy people.” The rich are always looking for something novel to spend their money on.
What’s more, this would be a highly professional service: they could draw on top-notch actors from three drama schools who might be glad of a job that just lasted a week. And they have impressive friends in the industry – Richard Attenborough’s grandsons, Tom, a director, and Will, an actor, were at Cambridge with them. Freddie Fox was at Guildhall with Mel. Niamh Cusack, part of the eminent Irish acting dynasty, became a patron of Go People after Lucy helped her actor husband Finbar Lynch to hospital when he suffered a cycling accident on the way to the play they were both performing in.
Their first private performance was in a “phenomenal apartment overlooking Covent Garden” belonging to parents of an acquaintance, for an invited audience of professionals and the family’s friends, with a collection for charity at the end. They performed three vignettes: two comic, one tragic. “That was when we realised that the dark stuff doesn’t work,” says Lucy. The process was honed further through private shows staged under the auspices of Go People, and this month they formally launch Revels in Hand.
They always meet clients first to suss out what they want and what will work. (A staging of Twelfth Night wouldn’t fit my budget, my mood or my small living room, for instance.) Sometimes they give a reassuring speech beforehand. “We are intimate but not immersive,” says Freddie. “You are not going to get picked on.” They use full costumes but minimal set and lighting – my living room was transformed into the bedroom of Coward’s bickering couple in an hour, and pristinely restored afterwards. The fact that actors and audience are in the same space and in the same light sets up an intriguing dynamic: there is a complicity that you don’t get in a traditional theatre, which I found very powerful.
“It’s theatre in its purest form, in that it exists solely because of the people watching it in the room,” says Freddie. “We are only there because people have let us in. A lot of people are repeat customers or their friends.”
Although audience members are urged to “talk, pour more wine, go to the loo”, many get totally absorbed. At a wedding reception, Mel and Lucy were performing Hermia and Helena’s quarrel from A Midsummer Night’s Dream among the crowd when a guest turned to Lucy and said: “Isn’t she a bitch?” And after a show, the actors are happy to stay and talk to guests. “We are yours for the evening, if you want us,” says Mel, though they will fade away if needed. Discretion is a big part of their offer.
They are bound by non-disclosure agreements from naming wealthy individual clients, but one family offered them the use of a private hair salon in their home, and another owned the aforementioned polo field. They have worked with the Dorchester and Millennium hotels and banks including Schroders and RPC. The fact that they’ve been enthusiastically commissioned to create events by clubs such as the Ivy and Home House – full of jaded entertainment people – has convinced them they are on to something novel and potentially lucrative.
But doesn’t a private service play up the image of theatre as elitist, performed by and for the privileged? “I think we can sleep well in our beds because we are the Robin Hoods of theatre,” says Lucy. “If we can make Revels in Hand work in the way we believe it can, we can not only pay actors – from all sorts of backgrounds – properly, but we can go to very wealthy people, ask them to invest in us, spend large amounts of money on a luxury service, and we can continue to do public shows in theatres where you can get a ticket for £10.
“Yes, this is elitist. Yes, this is luxury. Yes, 99 per cent of people in the world couldn’t afford it. But the one per cent who can are helping us do our other work.”
‘Audience members are urged to talk, pour more wine, go to the loo…’