BECAUSE THE NIGHT: An immersive theatre adventure in the historic Malthouse opens this March

Malthouse Theatre, home of Melbourne’s most provocative theatre, will debut Because The Night from 23 March, a new landmark immersive theatre show, which takes place across more than 30 custom-built fantasy rooms in the historic Malthouse building in Southbank.

Because The Night draws inspiration from the explosive story of Hamlet. The threads of corruption, love, and revenge are reimagined in a new play, set in a fictional 1980s wood logging town called Elsinore, where the sudden death of the king and an uprising workers’ rights movement threatens the stability of the crown. Inside the palace are whispers and eruptions, and the ancient forest is holding a secret that will topple everyone as the town prepares for their annual winter solstice carnival.

During the show, audiences can freely explore the detailed world as the performance unfolds around them. As a silent witness to the story, audiences start from one of three entrances and can follow the actors and the main narratives, or venture off the beaten track to uncover hidden rooms and secrets hiding in the palace.

Devised by Malthouse Theatre’s artistic team, including Artistic Director and Co-CEO Matthew Lutton, and Resident Artists Ra Chapman and Kamarra Bell-Wykes, Because The Night was created as a direct response to COVID-19 in order to perform to reduced audience numbers and promote a safe theatre experience for actors and audiences. The show will be performed by six actors to just 60 audience members in two sessions per night, where the theatre is thoroughly cleaned between performances and actors and audiences can maintain social distancing during the performance.

Matthew Lutton commented:

We are creating an entire fictional world that an audience is empowered to walk around and explore. It invites you to follow your own curiosities—to open doors and follow the stories that entice you—to escape from the outside world and be immersed in an alternative reality. The Hamlet narrative of a murder covered up, regime change, and a son seeking revenge is one narrative unfolding. But we have invented entirely new stories for the other characters we have ripped from the Hamlet myth. We’ve created a country where everything is in flux; the ruling family is cracking, the timber workers are revolting, and the forest is fighting back. To my knowledge, there has never been an immersive show of this scale and nature created in Australia.

Because The Night was dreamed up during the winter lockdown when Matt and I were despairing of how we could bring artists and audiences back together with the constant hovering spectre of COVID-19. We wanted to do two things that were seemingly contradictory: to create a new work of scale greater than anything we had done before, and for this to have inbuilt flexibility for audience numbers. Logistics have been extremely complicated but the entire Malthouse Theatre team has risen to the challenge to create an unforgettable experience for audiences—to reach beyond expectations by creating a production that will be unlike anything we’ve made before. Audiences deserve a transporting live experience, and our artists and team are itching to create it.

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