Brick and Mortar Constraints

I love theatre. I also love books and movies, but theatre is different.

In movies, anything the artist imagines, they can create. For the most part, it’s a matter of budget and, until recently, technology. The more the technology advances, the fewer the things that cannot be created as a collection of pixels. In the right artistic hands, and with a well-crafted vision, creating a world with so many details that it will be fantastical and realistic at the same time is within reach.

Books are the complete opposite. The tools the artist has are as limited as they were two hundred years ago: words, sentences, and paragraphs arranged on pages. Nothing more. And yet, a well-written book can invite you into an imaginary world just like a high-budget movie can. A talented author can create a world in their mind and share it with you using nothing more than language. A book can open a door that connects your imagination with that of the author.

Despite seeming radically different, both the written language and the cinematic universe are limitless. When it comes to books and movies, the physical reality is not a constraint.

Theatre is different. A play starts in the playwright’s imagination and is then captured using words and sentences, much like a written story or the screenplay of a movie. But unlike the pages of a book or the pixels on the screen, a play is mounted in the real, physical world. You can play with the lighting and the set; you can design costumes and compose a soundtrack; you can instruct the actors, but at the end of the day, you have a well-defined, limited playground to work with. And you still have to create magic for your audience.

That’s what I find fascinating about theatre. In theory, it is closer to the audience, since everything in the play unfolds in the same physical space the audience occupies. There is no two-dimensional screen or a white page with black markings acting as a barrier between the imagined world and the audience. But this very same property imposes real-world constraints on a theatrical production. You can describe an army of thousands in a book. You can see these thousands of people on the movie screen. Words can conjure a foreign country — its scenery, its light, the feeling of walking its streets. A movie can capture that visually. But there’s no way to squeeze an army onto a theatre stage. No set can accommodate entire streets, cities, and landscapes. And yet, the talented people who create theatre must bring the imagined world to life within this limited space, governed by physical rules.

When a theatrical production manages to overcome these physical limitations and convince you of the existence of a different reality right there on stage, it’s magical. On rare occasions, it is even more than that. It’s more than storytelling — it’s reshaping reality.

With that in mind, we went out of the Charing Cross station in London, heading to the Kit Kat Club. Yes, it sounds like a shady nightclub, because that’s exactly what it was. After a very short walk, we found ourselves in front of a Victorian building, waiting in line outside a small back door. Before we were permitted to enter, we were asked to place a sticker on our phone’s camera. It had the logo of the club and a message that sounded as threatening as it was inviting: “Keep it in the Kit Kat Club.”

The bouncer showed us in through the small door and down a narrow staircase. With each step, it got darker. The air began to look smoky as we became aware of the sounds of music, chatter, and clinking glasses. Without asking for it, someone surprised us with a drink. We continued to navigate the narrow maze. People wearing strange outfits (or should I say barely wearing any outfit at all) were dancing around us. The sound became dense. Within two minutes, the world outside was no more than a faded memory.

When it was time, we were shown the way to our seats. The music never stopped as we realized the musicians, wearing equally strange outfits, were sitting next to us. Other guests were eating and drinking around small tables while dancers flirted with them without saying a word. The nightclub had an uncanny vibe. It felt both historical and futuristic, sexy and ominous. It felt out of this world, and at the same time, the world itself.

And then, the light went out. A few seconds passed, and drums began rolling. As they stopped abruptly, a single projector lit the center of a small, rounded stage. It was time for Cabaret.

Cabaret is set in Berlin in the late 1920s. Half of the play takes place in a nightclub — an island that tries to detach itself from what’s starting to unfold outside. A strange, decadent bubble that, in retrospect, appears to be the only sane thing in the mad world surrounding it, until that cruel world gets its hold on the club and the boundaries between the two dissolve.

When director Rebecca Frecknall and designer Tom Scutt decided to revive the musical Cabaret in 2020, they wanted it to be an experience. They wanted the audience to be in that club, to get pulled out of the real world into that crazy scene. They wanted to bring the Kit Kat Club to life, so when the bubble is burst towards the end of the play, the audience is already deep at its center.

But a theatre is part of the physical world. It occupies a well-defined space. There’s a stage, a venue, seats, and walls. Unlike a page filled with words or an IMAX screen with millions of pixels, the Playhouse theatre hosting the new production is made of concrete and stone.

Frecknall and Scutt didn’t let that stop them. On the contrary, they harnessed the realness of the brick-and-mortar theatre to create an even stronger illusion. They wanted to build the Kit Kat Club. For real.

The interior of the Playhouse theatre was completely rebuilt. Instead of the traditional stage facing rows of audience seats, Frecknall and Scutt designed a circular stage surrounded by nightclub-style tables. The main entrance was shut, and instead, they redesigned the venue to route the audience through a service entrance and narrow corridors. Every glass and decoration was carefully chosen. The entire building became the set. The entire staff of the theatre is dressed as bouncers, bartenders, and waiters in a nightclub, and the cast of the show interacts with the club’s visitors long before the show starts.

The location on the tickets reads The Kit Kat Club, and if you look it up in Google Maps, you will find it, right there near Charing Cross.

By the time the lights go out and you hear the drum rolls, you already forget that you are in a theatre. You are in the Kit Kat Club. You are part of it, and it becomes part of you.

Creativity always requires us to work within constraints. Sometimes, they are nothing but false assumptions we need to see through. Other times, they are real. More than real — they are physical, and our natural instinct is to find ways to work around them.

But there’s a more radical option. Instead of working around the constraints, work with them. Harness them. Leverage them, and turn them into the core of the solution.

Think of a challenge you face. Think of a problem you need to solve. Consider the brick and mortar walls that define them. The breakthrough you are looking for might already be within these walls.