Hexmoor: The Longest Night, a new seasonal immersive theatre show with cocktails, opens beneath Hackney Road on 3rd November and runs Tuesday to Sunday until 10th January. Tickets from £48, with three cocktails included.
On 21 December the sun sets on the longest night of the year. At Hexmoor, a live-actor prison show in east London, the inmates keep that night at every show from 3rd November to 10th January. They are held under several thousand feet of concrete, nobody can see the sky, and nobody wants to guess wrong.
The reason sits in the realm’s oldest record. Thousands of years ago the Bureau of Arcane Order cast the Hollow King into the void and sealed him there with light. On the longest night, light is at its weakest everywhere at once, and he can reach back through. So the Bureau orders every building in the realm to keep a flame burning from dusk until first light, prisons included. High Constable Cordelia Constance-Xanthe IV has relayed the order to her inmates and is complying to the letter. The notice on the wing adds that any inmate found negotiating with the Hollow King will lose canteen privileges.
For the first time in its history, Hexmoor is decorated. The inmates have dressed the wing with whatever they could steal: jumpsuits twisted into wreaths, confiscated keys strung along the bars. For once, the prison is beautiful. Every cell is issued a lantern and ordered to keep it lit until dawn. Then frost starts forming on the inside of the walls, the lanterns begin to fail, and the Hollow King is due at midnight.
Guests arrive convicted of crimes of dark magic. They are issued a jumpsuit at the door, so nobody needs a costume, and locked in a cell. Each guest is given a wand, and its light shows up contraband hidden around the wing. Find enough of it and you find the vault, where the wand becomes the price of entry. Three cocktail potions are smuggled in over the course of the night. Half the show is comedy.
The Longest Night replaces the standard Hexmoor show for the season, with its own story and its own tickets, so past inmates come back to a new sentence. Winter Enchanter tickets add a festive cocktail and a Hexmoor tin candle, so guests can take the flame home. Groups of 30 or more can hire Hexmoor privately for their Christmas party with exclusive benefits.
Sam Shearman, founder of Inventive Productions, said: “We wanted to know what a prison does at Christmas when it has nothing to decorate with. The inmates steal whatever isn’t nailed down and make the place lovely, before the lights start going out. Our fantasy realm and the real world turn under the same sun, so the real solstice falls on 21 December for both. Nobody inside Hexmoor can see the sky, though, so they keep the Observance all season. Every night could be the one.”
