Whilst the stage of Brighton’s oldest theatre – the Georgian chocolate-box Theatre Royal – is dark, audiences are still being admitted via the 200 year-old stage door. A series of opportunities to explore backstage, of which What Is It About That Night is the fullest production, have been curated to entice the public into the building’s usually unseen spaces in its Winter Out of Hours programme.
It’s an intriguing premise, and gathering outside the theatre’s tiny stage door on a near-deserted side street on Brighton’s North Lanes feels rather glamorously illicit. The rich history of the Theatre Royal, a warren of intriguing corners and host to two centuries of theatre stars from Charles Kemble to Noel Coward, offers an incredible starting point for site-specific devising. And so one can’t help feeling the weight of missed opportunities in this slight production from local research-focused theatre company Root Experience.
There is something out of focus in the frame, which establishes that the show was created in response to Ireton’s time on the stage door in Edinburgh but which elides this into a narrative placing her amongst the history of the Theatre Royal. I’m all for total creative license when it comes to creating stories, but all making this explicit did was undermine my trust in our narrator, distracting me from the historical anecdotes I’m sure we were intended to take as read.
Ireton’s presence is utterly charming, and the chance to basically participate in such an intimate gig felt very privileged, but I wished for greater variety in the material presented and the musical style. A tantalising hint of what Ireton could do if she really let rip was there in her Deitrich cover, but it was back under wraps all too soon. More seriously, the link between the songs’ content and the framing conversation attempting to link them to the spaces felt as unclear as the solo performer’s relationship to the material itself. For a research-based company it seemed a shame that the writing focused on only the most famous stories about the theatre’s history and the use of the space felt rather pedestrian. The gig set-up of the final section in the auditorium was far less interesting than what had preceded it, and so made for an odd finale, and to miss the trick of showing us the auditorium from the stage (I heard several audience members wondering ‘Is this the stage?’ as we crossed it) felt like a criminally wasted opportunity.
There were some sweet moments in this production: the glimpse of feet in the front row as we sat under the stage; the revelation of an actors-only bar hatch backstage granting us a snifter of whiskey before stepping out onto the boards. And there is certainly talent here in the shape of Ireton’s gentle presence and her hidden supporting musicians, but this understated performance left me feeling disappointed. So much more could have been done to animate this atmospheric space and its hidden histories.