Inside ‘Immersive Gatsby,’ the Longest-Running Immersive Show in the UK (Q&A)

We chat about producer Brian Hook about the hit show based upon F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel

Immersive Gatsby has been delighting audiences in London since it began in 2015 and subsequently joined the VAULT Festival in 2017; the show recently became the UK’s longest running immersive production. Our review called it “an immersive theatrical experience with its own distinct personality, one which invites the audience in to be a co-conspirator in the frivolities.”

We caught up with producer Brian Hook as the team prepares to open the show in Belgium in March.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

No Proscenium (NP): Could you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

Brian Hook (BH): I’m the producer on Immersive Gatsby. I’m originally from Manchester and now live in London. In essence, I’m a commercial theatre producer. I tend to split my time pretty much 50/50 between producing large scale musicals and freeform narrative led immersive theatre. I co-own and run the Olivier Award-winning Hartshorn-Hook Productions and The Guild Of Misrule as well as IAM, a marketing company, and Arts Tickets, a ticketing company that looks after immersive and non-traditional theatre shows in the UK and abroad.

NP: What, in a nutshell, is Immersive Gatsby?

BH: It’s a narrative-led immersive adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic. These days it takes place in Gatsby’s Drugstore which is over 9,000 square feet — two floors of a converted warehouse in the centre of London.

NP: How did the project first come about? What drew you to the source material?

BH: Originally we looked at making The Beautiful and Damned, which is a show we’re still pretty keen to make. We had taken over an old pub in York in 2015 which we ran for a year called the Fleeting Arms. It was a space for artists to make work and spend time and be supported. The idea was you could use the space for free and, if you put something on for the weekends that would bring people together, the bar’s income would support the venue and the whole thing would “wash its face ”— that was the theory.

For the 11th month, we decided to create The Great Gatsby across the three floors of that pub, in a pretty rare event for the city of York. It was an absolute smash, then transferred to VAULT Festival. We sold every single ticket and two years on… and here we are.

We always make work that puts audiences in the beating heart of a story and try and tell that story in the most logical way. For us, Gatsby was about throwing a slamming party, creating a world to explore, and putting our audiences in a world they can interact with.

NP: How does the world of Gatsby come to life in your immersive production?

BH: We start our show in 1924, two years after the book was written. Our 200 audience members, they come dressed to the nines in a Prohibition-era drugstore. They’ve been invited to the drugstore.

Among the bustle of the bar and the jazz music, a man addresses the crowd. He remembers, some time ago, a chauffeur crossing his lawn in a Robin’s-egg blue uniform to deliver an invitation… then we’re transported back as the doors kick open to Gatsby’s world.

Nick is joined by Tom and Daisy Buchanan, Jordan Baker, George and Myrtle Wilson, Rosie, Lucille, and Joey who each mingle with the audience, sneaking folks off to see the world of Gatsby come to life through their eyes.

NP: How is the audience incorporated into the work and how are you designing around audience agency, consent, and safety?

BH: The audience are integral to the show. About 20% of the dialogue is improvised with the audience. If they follow certain characters and win their trust, they’re given tasks, notes to pass on or choose not to. The core of the story never changes, as there’s always a car crash (spoiler)… but they have the ability to challenge and to influence who knows what, to raise and lower the stakes.

In terms of the audience’s consent and safety, we take a pretty pro-active approach to our show. We’re constantly learning and evaluating what we do. We’ve got our eyes open to the fact that our audiences want to come and have an experience. We run two bars during our performance and we have a show that contains sex, drinking, fights, and arguments.

By our very nature, we’ve asked an audience to come into that journey with us, but it isn’t without support. We have a huge amount of care and infrastructure that sits underneath the show, some of it very visible and some of it entirely and deliberately hidden. For instance, we have a four tier system of internal codes and silent alerts that allow our cast to communicate with each other and the ground staff on the show. We’ve got 2 full time SIA members of staff (SIA is the legal qualification in the UK to be a door supervisor) on the show and have allowed all of our management team to undertake this training and — really importantly — we have a chat with our audience before they walk into the world which reminds them that our actors are people there to do a job, that they will respect their boundaries, and that we ask them to respect theirs.

NP: What’s surprised you so far during the development of the show?

BH: The show has, and continues to be a learning curve. I think i’m most surprised by it’s popularity, three and a half years after it was first conceived. It’s still selling out shows. We’ve rotated casts a few times now with our last original cast member leaving in October. Watching new blood come through and find their way through the 11 hours worth of script is a real thrill and a brilliant education for any producer. The amount of gin our audiences go through, hot damn, that was a shock! The Immersive Gatsby is the second biggest distributor of Copperhead gin in the world.

NP: How have audiences reacted to the show?

BH: On the whole, they’ve bloody loved it.

It took us a little while to get the messaging right. Our marketing company want to use buzzwords like “party,” but if we’ve slammed “party” all over our messaging, our audiences turn up expecting a party and not to interact with or listen to our cast.

NP: Why do you think the show has been able to run for so long, to become London’s longest running immersive show?

BH: First of all, it stands up as a good bit of art. Second of all (I get that it’s a slightly dull answer to a cool question), it’s to do with the fundamental financial structure of the production and how it supports its performers. There’s no distinction between tickets and bar income to the production, so what you have is a system where the income is all pooled into one place. The cast, staff, and crew are all paid from this pot first, meaning that if we hit a seasonally tough week or we run into a cost we weren’t anticipating, the bar can support the artists wages.

In a traditional theatre setup, the venue takes the bar and the rent, which means a show must survive on ticket sales alone. The way we roll is fairer on our cast, on our investors (who partake in the bar income), and makes for a safe and sustainable business model. We have a constantly achievable break even and some well looked-after investors. It’s a model we are teaching and hoping to roll out across more work that we make.

We pay our cast 44% above the union minimums for this kind of work. Our bar staff are on the London Living Wage. We run a 50/50 gender split on the show with a company wage, ensuring no gender pay gaps, and we expect our ensemble to work just as hard as our title characters and they absolutely do. We’re advocates of BAME- and Trans-inclusive casting. We re-invest profits constantly in the set, costumes, and venue to ensure we get better and better. We’ve raised tens of thousands for charities across the time we’ve been going.

In essence, I think one of the biggest things that’s kept us going is that we care so damn much about every aspect of what we’re doing. We’re self aware and we learn and improve and want to get better. We’re alive and an evolving bit of theatre, rather than a stagnant play being wheeled out night after night, and I think that shows. We’re damn proud of everyone who comes to the show for being a part of this brilliant and beautiful thing.

NP: Immersive Gatsby has popped up in multiple locations across the UK and Ireland since it began. Could you tell us a little about how you’ve managed that?

BH: It’s usually come from audience members who are theatre makers, producers, venue owners, or the like, who have come to see the show and reach out to us to see if there’s a partnership to be had. The international conversations take years to come to fruition. So we’re now feeling lots of conversations that have been bubbling away for years are coming to fruition.

NP: What’s it been like opening a new version of Immersive Gatsby in Belgium? Are you tailoring the experience for local audiences?

BH: Yeah, Belgium is a brilliant and rather exciting adventure for us. We took the show for a one-off party to a small town on the border of Belgium and France. Some of the guests of that performance banded together to present the work in Belgium. Six months later, we’re translating the show into French and Flemish. The production will play in languages: Flemish, English, and French in rotating weeks. It’s a massive undertaking. Alexander Wright, the original director and the chap who created the show alongside the original cast, is overseeing the production with local language associates and each cast and language has nuances we’re building into the fibers of the script.

NP: Who is the ideal audience member for this show?

BH: I have two favorite kinds of audiences: the ones who dress to the nines, who’ve read the book a thousand times, and are moved to tears by their interactions or overjoyed that they could quiz the cast on their own favorite segments of the book, only to be met with a response that exceeds their expectations; or the kind of audience who just rocked up after work, they’re in their office gear with their bags on their backs, red-faced from the commute and the hustle and bustle, and who bought a ticket for some show they heard about, they didn’t read too much on and they couldn’t make it on any other night. And then bam, flabbergasted and unexpected, they’re catapulted into our world for a few hours.

My job is to make worlds for folks to get lost in, and with Gatsby, that’s something we knock out of the park six times a week.

NP: What do you hope participants take away from the experience?

BH: I hope they get the opportunity to leave themselves at the door. I hope we give them a genuine alternative to spending £75 to sit in the gods at a traditional west end theatre sipping on a £9 G and T. We work damn hard to keep Gatsby affordable, to make sure that the prices of the bars dont fleece our audience, and that they’re cared for at every single step. Without them, of course, we’re nothing. I hope they feel that.

Immersive Gatsby continues its open-ended run in London. Tickets start at £31.25. The show plans to open in Belgium in March 2019. Tickets are currently on sale.

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