Interview: Matt Bennett on Secret Cinema presents ROMEO + JULIET

Last week, Secret Cinema Founder Fabien Riggall spoke to us about ten years of SC. Looking back on his past learnings, he also shared his excitement for what the future holds, including Secret Cinema presents Romeo + Juliet.

In the run up to this event, we caught up with Matt Bennett, the Creative Director. Hearing about his journey from audience member to artistic direction, Matt let us in on some secrets ahead for this summer's show including an exclusive...

What was the first Secret Cinema you ever experienced as an audience member?

Well honestly, it was a bit of a disaster....

Oh no!

But my fault though...

I'd seen the Secret Cinema name around, but I didn't really know what it was. And my friend got me on the guest list for The Third Man, so I didn't go through the newsletter, I didn't get the briefing, I didn't go on their website...I didn't know anything.

I turned up like a total scruff, in a hoodie and skate pants. And it was at this amazing building near Smithfields market near Fabric. I was stopped dead in my tracks when I saw these impeccably dressed SC enthusiasts, who turned up in their army based suits. And my heart sank and I realised I got it really wrong.

When Prometheus was announced, I quickly made amends, but by getting maybe a bit too involved with my own "Black Ops" badges and various props to gain access to areas I wasn't meant to enter.

So involved in fact, you ended up working for Secret Cinema.

Exactly! I got brought into Secret Cinema to head up their Music department about three and a half years ago. So I deliver all the music, all the bands, I've contributed to the sound design, booked DJs, researched all the different sounds of the world.

And that part in particular can be a great challenge. We build entire nightclubs out of about 15 seconds of music sometimes. Whether it's a Motown club in Dr. Strangelove or a bar in Tatooine, an African jazz bar in Star Wars, or a blood rave in 28 Days Later, then the founder Fabien Riggall has always insisted that music's been at the heart of Secret Cinema shows.

We've just finished an incredible three month run of Secret Cinema presents Blade Runner - The Final Cut and we had an amazing Secret Club there: Taffey's Snake Pit. It's just endlessly fascinating to be able to explode these little scenes from Hollywood, and turn them into real places filled with real people and real conversations.

And it's been such a pleasure coming into a company that is so musically orientated, and being able to have such an impact on it is amazing. And then because I think music is so at the heart of Secret Cinema, my role naturally grew and grew.

This year, you're taking on the role of Creative Director for Romeo + Juliet. How familiar were you with the original play?

I studied English at Glasgow University, and one lecturer there, Paddy Lyons taught me how playful you can be with Shakespeare, how you can break the rules with it. But before that, it wasn't on the GCSE syllabus when I went to school.

We've recently smashed into a whole GCSE world. It's quite funny actually. When we design a show, obviously we build what we call pre-narrative worlds online. And so we are building a whole world around fair Verona Beach. But because so many GCSE projects have now encouraged their students to do a similar thing (albeit at school level), all of the Twitter handles and Facebook handles, anything to do with Verona, 'fair Verona' or Verona Beach are completely gone!

There's thousands of school kids who have already built these online worlds of Verona. We explored loads of them and it was amazing to see so many different versions and people thinking and talking about this play in different ways. In the end we've had to zig zag completely and call our own online community Voice of Verona that has its own charms.

How do you feel about adapting Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, one which so many generations are so familiar with?

For me, there aren't that many great Shakespeare films...yet! But it just so happens that this is one of the most loved films that has ever been made. And so seeing our audience reaction when we announced it was incredible.

And our demographic covers around 25 to 40 so many of our audience really remember the mid-90's: it's was a vivid time where mobile phones came along and the internet came and Britpop and grunge and hip-hop and drum and bass and house, all these amazing sounds going on.

So what can we expect from this world?

Well we have so much to work with. Just the way the music blends with the story and that the beach almost is a stage, it's just a joy to work with this material, from the play and the film.

It's been really satisfying to interpret Baz Luhrmann's film and turn it into an immersive, 360 degree space and show. Our site is massive: we're building all the venues and as much of the world as we can. And so it's taking it back to a very, very new stage, a massive stage.

But we're bringing so much learning with us, particularly from Moulin Rouge. The creative director on that Fabien Riggall took that show and made the world's first immersive musical. So you can expect all the wisdom from that hit....how we grew as a theatre company and how we delivered music to 1,000 people is very much going to power the Romeo + Juliet experience.

How we touch the hearts of 5,000 people every night, using music, spectacle and actors. We are being very thoughtful about how we arm the audience with music, so they can participate at the highest level.

Music, stage and spectacle...it sounds like a festival!

Well, do you know what...it is a festival! And we've got the Pyramid Stage PA for our show, which is a lovely fact that I can leak to you!

Wow!

Yes, it's a fallow year at Glastonbury and we're lucky enough to have got this incredible PA. So we just really need to make sure that we work it hard.

And we're really excited about that and the site: how we can spread out, build a bigger world, but still have these incredible venues that we construct and the worlds that sit within the worlds.

(Another little thing: we also have a club within a club with Romeo + Juliet, a really banging club for people to discover)

So music is going to form a massive part of this experience.

I mean one of the most exciting things about this show for me is taking a city like London (that is so musical and so influential with music fans around the world), and then taking Shakespeare which is so rhythmic and poetic in itself.

So we're creating this reverberating world from those two: one of rhymes, iambic pentameter, couplets, rhythm, incredible poetry and basically word slam. How we're going to interweave all of that into this big musical storyline, that's hopefully going to wrap itself around every single audience member.

We've already seen some of that world and met some of the characters in a pop-up a few weeks ago...

Yes! We did a pop-up on the South Bank by the Globe where we introduced people to many of the characters including Mercutio and Father Lawrence and his Choir who entertained the crowd.

Can you reveal anything about the characters that the audience themselves will be taking on?

You'll have to wait and see. But obviously, it's a story of great rivalry and we expect our audience to become great rivals and also great lovers. It's going to be a real journey for them.

We're setting this one up as a prequel, so our story will plug them into the start of the film in a very slick way. And Shakespeare threw us a bone, a golden opportunity with starting his play on brawl number three. So that alone loads tension: what's happening at those first two brawls. How are they going to play out? Who's going to win?

One of the emphases of that pop-up was peace: "Today is a day of peace". How do you think that theme speak to today?

Well the film narrative completely mirrors the reality we live in today with violence. Some elements of our society face such inequality, exclusion and abuse that it triggers street warfare and this is happening right now.

We wanted to produce an event that helps raise awareness of this but also helps tackle it through partnering with the right charity.

So we picked our charity very carefully on this one. We partnered with MAC-UK, dedicated to improving the lives of young people trapped in uncertain cycles of violence, exclusion and abuse. And they work at grass roots level to work with communities to tackle the same issues of the violence that we see in the film. And we will raise quite a significant amount of money to start projects in Ealing and Hounslow that address the same issues as the film.

So it's sensitive, but it's really powerful what people can do in terms of aligning the film narrative with their realities and London and doing our bit to alleviate the issue.

Finally, what would you say to someone who has never experienced immersive or anything like this before, who's thinking of coming?

Do not be scared. It's like the real world: it's like going into a shop or a bar and seeing someone there you don't know, and speaking to them. We've created this world where anything is up for grabs: you can go anywhere, speak to anybody and your participation will unlock so many wonders and surprises.

So my advice would be just step into the world, don't be scared of anything. If you have time to go into that pre-story, definitely make sure you dress up (learn from me!) Have that character when you step into the world, and you'll just have the night of your life.

Secret Cinema presents Romeo + Juliet, 8-25 August

Check out our interview with the Founder of Secret Cinema: Fabien Riggall.

Photo Credits: Camilla Greenwell, Laura Little, Luke Dyson