It may be December and the time where a lot of the shows are based around the festive season, well there are other shows that are not about the season and today we are looking at one of those shows. Bag of Beard Theatre are bringing to London the urban legend The Highgate Vampire this December between the 16th-30th December at the Omnibus Theatre. Today I speak to Alexander Knott and James Demaine all about it.
Hello! Tell us about yourself?
We are Alexander Knott and James Demaine from Bag of Beard Theatre Company. We are a devised, collaborative, collective company making theatre with original words and original music. We have been going since 2016 or thereabouts. We all trained Italia Conti drama school together, and off the back of that training started making theatre with stripped back minimalist new writing, as well as elements of poetry and, crucially, originally composed music. Alex and Ryan Hutton are the Joint Directors, James writes, acts and plays music, and Sam Heron is the company composer. So we’re all very collaborative in how we make theatre.
Tell us a bit about the show The Highgate Vampire?
Well, how long have you got?! It’s an outrageous true story that happened in the 1970s. Due to an element of mass hysteria – newspaper rumours that there was a vampire haunting Swaine’s Lane in Highgate and the area around the cemetery – people descended on the graveyard itself and began to take matters into their own hands! Digging up graves and putting garlic into the mouth of corpses, trying to stop the supernatural from rising!
At the heart of the story were two figures (who we have fictionalised for our play) – one was a catholic priest-slash-vampire slayer and the other was a sort of shaman, occult practitioner who ran a Tobacconist’s shop by day. When James first came to me with his story, I couldn’t believe it, but the more we worked on it the more we discovered it was much truer than we would like.
We’ve taken this true, unbelievable and very spooky story and turned it into an eccentric and laugh a minute dark comedy, as these two larger than life figures try to deliver a scientific lecture about the vampire, but cannot help but fall into the performance of a play.
How are rehearsals going?
I think it’s fair to say that this piece has been thoroughly workshopped by this stage – we were delighted to be part of the final incarnation of the mighty VAULT Festival in 2023. We created a piece of theatre called ‘The Messiah Complex’ that we had been trying to write, devise, create for the best part of seven whole years and we finally managed it, after we were long listed for the VAULT Five Award in 2022 – and then the whole festival was postponed due to a resurgence of Covid but we finally got to VAULT for 2023.
Wind forward to now, and the spirit of VAULT lives on in the company VAULT Creative Arts, which runs The Glitch Café and performance space, and we were very pleased to be part of their inaugural season of works in progress where we workshopped The Highgate Vampire, in May this year.
We now have our full premiere at the Omnibuys Theatre in Clapham, but we’ve also been honoured to be the first recipient of the inaugural Stephen Joseph Transfer Award which means that the show will also be coming to The Cockpit Theatre in 2026!
It’s been great to have the opportunity to try out this material in front of an audience and see how they respond to it and so far they’ve been responding to it very vocally indeed. We hope we can carry that into this Christmas run.
What can you tell us about the stage set?
Rather excitingly our set all comes out of a single vintage wooden trunk, specifically the sort of wooden trunk that would’ve been used on Royal Navy ships up until around 1950 or ’60.
We found this wooden trunk on eBay for a steal and had it delivered to our rehearsal space in South London. It has a real history to it. Also after a bit of tinkering by our producer Zoe Grain it is sturdy enough to stand on. Every prop and piece of costume that we need to inhabit all the different characters in the show comes out of this crate – from a headscarf for Mrs Petunia Battersby to the Keanu Reeves style outfit of the Leader of the cult like CLOAK organisation, to a ukulele that makes a surprise appearance for vaudeville singalong!
We have always strived to make work with a sense of minimalism by creating worlds out of symbols and gestures on stage, along with original words and original music. This trunk as our singular piece of set is very much true to that and the great thing about this play is that it is taking place wherever we are performing it – the “lecture” is always happening in the room with the audience. In many ways this play is slightly immersive, the characters are in the room telling the story of the Highgate Vampire directly to YOU – and you may not be safe….
Tell us a little bit about the rest of the cast?
The two of us, James Demaine and Alexander Knott, are performing it. We wrote the script together and then it is directed by Ryan Hutton, with sound design and original music by Samuel Heron. But for the majority of the show it is just the two of us on stage with with one notable exception – our producer Zoe Grain also plays the role of Audrey the Technical Operator!
Audrey is the long suffering assistant, and she deserves a big shout out because while Zoe not only keeps us on track with all the behind-the-scenes work of the production, she acts as Audrey and, as you’ll discover, Audrey has important contributions to make during the show. Zoe is also literally technically operating the show (pressing the buttons for the lighting and sound), so she is a real hero and we wanted to give her a big shout out!
What is the most challenging thing about doing the show?
Keeping the energy up and keeping the shows as dynamic and fresh and lively as we can. You always have to find every moment of a play for the first time, every time, but with this in particular because we really want the audience to believe that they are here in the room with us, and this lecture and everything that happens during the telling of the tale of the vampire is happening live in front of them. So those fundamental rules of acting are as important as ever.
What have been some of the best highlights since doing the show?
When we performed the show at The Glitch in Waterloo we had real people who had been involved in the events at Highgate Cemetery in the 1970s come and see the play – including people who had been part of the night-time raids on the tombs in the search for the vampire! We were re-creating the story in front of the people who did it for real.
What is the best reaction you have had from an audience member?
One of these audience members was an older hippie gentlemen with a ponytail and a goatee. He clocked Alex playing the Bishop immediately as someone he recognised from that era. Alex got a nod and a “Hello, mate” from this gentleman, as if Alex really WAS the person he was re-creating. That was ctually quite special as I think it shows we have tapped into something that is both interesting for a new audience, but has a deeply personal connection for the people who were there in the 1970s, fighting vampires.
If people want to follow you on social media, where can they find you?
Mainly on instagram – https://www.instagram.com/bagofbeardtheatre/
Tickets: https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/the-highgate-vampire/
Finally in three words why should people come to your show?
Vampires Among Us (if you want to find out how and why, then you’re going to have to see the show at the Clapham Omnibus Theatre between the 16th and 30th of December!)
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