Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin
Later this month, Sleepwalk Immersive’s Bacchanalia returns to London after two sold-out runs in 2023 and 2024. Set in a psychedelic 1960s reimagining of Thebes, the free-roam immersive experience invites audiences to follow a diverse cast of characters - including Dionysus, the mesmerising yet terrifying Greek god of wine and pleasure - as Thebes descends from order into chaos.
The show's upcoming run, which will take over multiple floors of Hoxton Hall, expands on previous iterations of Bacchanalia with a longer run time, additional content, and more experiences for individual audience members.
As rehearsals for the show got underway, we spoke with Sleepwalk Immersive’s Artistic Director, Sebastian Huang, about previously staging the show at CRYPT in Bethnal Green, how they came to secure Hoxton Hall for its return, and what audiences can expect from this expanded version of their 1960s-inspired Greek tragedy.
Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin
Immersive Rumours: Hi Sebastian. Thanks for speaking to us today! Can you tell us a bit about Sleepwalk Immersive and your role within the company?
Sebastian Huang: I'm Sebastian Huang, and I'm the Artistic Director at Sleepwalk Immersive. It's basically my job to oversee the creative output of the company and to keep it all to a certain standard.
Sleepwalk Immersive launched in 2023 specifically to grow Bacchanalia, which I had devised as a one-man show for an Extended Project Qualification when I was 16. The company mission has been to focus on storytelling and audience experience. We feel that we're part of the first generation making immersive theatre who have grown up with the form, and we're now on our third version of Bacchanalia but have also previously made some bespoke experiences for events.
Pete Broughton and Maya McQueen, who were co-creatives for the earlier versions, are concentrating on performance this time around. Ruth Howard, our Movement Director, is my right hand and has been a real force for this 2025 iteration. The same goes for Joel Moffett, who has always run lighting and sound and has been a behind-the-scenes hero in every respect. For this run, we are also joined by Amy Warren as Company Stage Manager. She’s incredibly experienced and has worked for some of the biggest names in the sector.
IR: Bacchanalia previously ran at CRYPT in 2023 and 2024, but for those who didn't attend those shows, do you mind giving us an overview of what it's all about?
Sebastian: Bacchanalia is an adaptation of The Bacchae by Euripides, and we’ve set it in this 60s America-inspired world. We focus mainly on narrative and storytelling, but we try to use lots of different theatrical mediums such as dance, spoken word, puppetry, physical theatre, all of that.
It's a fully free-roam immersive experience, and this time, we're going to be spanning multiple floors at Hoxton Hall. As an audience member, you can freely move as you wish throughout the space. You can follow a character, or follow a prop, or follow the music, and it's really all about giving the audience agency within the space to experience the story of the Greek god Dionysus coming to Thebes to avenge his mother and mess up the Theban family.
Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin
I don't think I could think so intensely about one project for so long if I didn't just love every second of it.
IR: You first had the idea to adapt The Bacchae into an immersive show when you were in college, and all these years later, it's still something you've continued to work on. What is it about The Bacchae that’s kept you coming back to it for so long?
Sebastian: I think from quite an early age, I loved the classical pantheons, the idea of multiple gods and their interactions with mortals. I think that always really intrigued me as a kid. When I studied The Bacchae as an A-Level text, it just clicked. I've always loved the Greek tragedies in theatre, and I was lucky enough to be exposed to some really phenomenal immersive theatre from quite an early age. It felt like a natural merge of two of my favourite passions.
The reason I've been able to do it for seven years or so now is because I really love it. I love the story. I love the context of the myths, and I love immersive theatre. Luckily, I've been given the opportunity to create my own work, and I think that out of everything, what I've loved the most is being able to creatively voice my passions and what inspires me. I don't think I could think so intensely about one project for so long if I didn't just love every second of it. I just find it the most fun thing ever.
IR: Bacchanalia is back next month at Hoxton Hall, but I’d love to chat about the show’s previous outing at CRYPT in Bethnal Green. What was it like getting the show mounted previously?
Sebastian: I mean, obviously, it's not necessarily an easy endeavour. It took a lot of people working very hard and really putting themselves into the project. It was very stressful, and it's the hardest thing I've ever done. No matter how stressful it was though, we're very, very proud of what we created.
With hindsight, if it wasn't for those two runs [at CRYPT] and the R&D's before, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing now. It's really nice to think about where it came from. To know that our hard work and all the blood, sweat, and tears we put into those first two runs hopefully have paid off now and have got us to where we are now is amazing.
Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin
IR: Looking back to 2023/2024, the critical response was really positive, and there was a lot of love for the show from audiences. How was it being on the receiving end of that as a new company mounting a new project?
Sebastian: It was a bit of a whirlwind. I think the first run sold out in 16 days, which was obviously really cool, but at the time, we didn’t have much of a perception of that. We were a young team wanting to put on a show, and the stars kind of aligned. When you say it's a new project, it was a new project and a new team, but you know, I was the director, and I'm by far the least experienced on the team. If you look at the cast we got and the creative team we had, there was a lot of experience and a lot of combined years in the industry.
For a lot of people, that 2023 run was the birth of Bacchanalia, but for me, I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager. It didn't necessarily feel like a new project to me at all. It just felt like the next steps of the project that I'd been working on for a while.
IR: Following the second run of Bacchanalia, Sleepwalk Immersive was part of the book launch for Anne Corlett's The Theatre of Glass and Shadows, which has an immersive theatre production at the core of its story. How did that collaboration come out?
Sebastian: Anne - who’s an amazing, talented, lovely individual - came to see the first run of Bacchanalia and then later introduced herself during the second run. My first memories of that project were meeting Anne in a café in Putney and talking about the book, talking about the launch, and just being really, really excited by it.
It was quite nice personally as well to do something like that because my brain has just been stuck in the Sixties for the last seven years. It was really cool to be inspired by such a great piece of new writing. It felt really fresh. We'd be keen to do more of that if anyone has any books coming out soon...
Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin
There's brand new content for fans of the last two runs to experience, a longer runtime, and more experiences for individual audience members, but we're keeping the core of what people saw at CRYPT.
IR: Let's discuss the upcoming run of Bacchanalia at Hoxton Hall. How did you settle on that venue being the right space for the show’s return?
Sebastian: When it came to the March 2024 run at CRYPT, one of our main objectives was to try and get a bigger venue out of it. We were brainstorming different venues and concluded that because of some of the themes present throughout Bacchanalia, and with Dionysus also being the god of theatre, a conventional theatre space would actually work.
I don't know if you remember, but quite a while ago, there was an immersive show at Hoxton Hall based around Hammer Horror. I was too young to go at the time, but my parents went and really enjoyed it. My parents reminded us of that show, so we invited Sam and Stu, who are the Head of Programming and the CEO of Hoxton Hall, down to the second run of the show.
They later reached out and said, ‘Hey, come and look at our space.’ I think even upon first impressions, we knew that Bacchanalia would fit very well into the venue. The kind of expansion we were looking to do also fit pretty perfectly with the number of rooms available at Hoxton Hall, and the team has been absolutely amazing. They were so keen to get this kind of work in their building and also came on to co-produce it, which is amazing. They’ve been lovely to work with, and they've been really great at guiding us through lots of stuff that we're less familiar with. It's felt like a very natural fit.
IR: Given the expanded space you've got to work with this time, that's going to have an impact on basically every part of how the 2023/2024 show was structured and timed. When planning and rehearsing for this Hoxton Hall run, does it feel like an expansion of the previous versions of the show or a complete do-over?
Sebastian: I think, to me, it's an expansion. There's brand new content for fans of the last two runs to experience, a longer runtime, and more experiences for individual audience members, but we're keeping the core of what people saw at CRYPT. It's still those themes; it’s still those characters.
What we’re finding really exciting and almost freeing is that because of the nature of the space being bigger with separate rooms, we're going to have multiple soundtracks and different things playing in different rooms. It means we don't have to compromise as much on the overall vision. A space like CRYPT, where you're limited by the sound capabilities, meant we only have one soundtrack. If one character had a sad scene, but these three other characters had a happy scene, we had to prioritise the happy scene, and you’d get happy music in this sad scene.
It's been really great to be able to compromise less on the individual characters' arcs too. Hopefully, people will feel like these characters have more time to develop their own story as well as the overall narrative. In particular, the Maenads have been fleshed out more, and it's really given us the freedom and space to dive a bit deeper into these characters.
Bacchanalia (2023/2024) Photo: Ivy Corbin
This show has to be created from the audience's point of view. How do we want the audience to feel? How can we treat the audience with love and respect?
IR: Something that came up last time we spoke was that the CRYPT version of the show was a scaled-back version of what you’d originally written years prior. Is staging the show at Hoxton Hall going to allow you to realise the full scope of the script?
Sebastian: I think the thing to bear in mind is when I first wrote the show, I was just a teenager who had no perception of what it takes to put on a show or how much money, hard work, and time it actually takes to create. The 100% full Bacchanalia would require so many resources; it’s probably not particularly doable at this stage. I'd say the show has definitely expanded, though. It's closer to that vision.
We'd love to keep expanding the show forever and ever, but the way we've done it for this venue feels appropriate and achievable, given the time and resources we have.
IR: One element of the previous staging of Bacchanalia that I think people loved was the intimacy and smaller moments with audiences. Is that still the case with the 2025 version?
Sebastian: We’re doing our very best to maintain that sense of intimacy, but I personally believe that sometimes it's easy to mistake intimacy for proximity. It really helps to build that into a setting if you are very close physically to the performance, but it needs to be embedded in the writing and the creation of the show.
Our aims are definitely to maintain that sense of intimacy, but with a bigger space and bigger rooms, we can explore how we carry that intimacy through to a larger space. Can we have epic moments as well as these intimate moments and explore the relationship between the two?
It sounds really cheesy, but it comes from an audience's point of view. This has only been my job for a couple of years, and before that, I was an audience member. That's something I'm really keen for our creatives to hold on to. This show has to be created from the audience's point of view. How do we want the audience to feel? How can we treat the audience with love and respect? When we say ‘the audience’, we don't mean the 90 people; we mean this one person. We like to think of them very much as individuals.
Photo: Ivy Corbin
IR: The pedigree of the people involved in 2023/2024’s Bacchanalia was incredibly high, and it’s only gotten better this time around with an expanded cast. What’s it been like welcoming these new faces into the Sleepwalk family?
Sebastian: For us, casting is such an important thing. Getting the right people in the room is one of the most important parts of doing this. We're just really lucky to get these people. It’s insane. All the new cast members have come in with a really great attitude. With the wealth of experience that we've gotten, especially with the new cast coming in, there are years and years of immersive work behind them. It's invaluable to get those creative minds in the room, working on a show like this.
I've been watching Rob [McNeill] and Oli [Towse] work since I was little, and I wanted to work with them all that time. Luckily, because of the connections we made and through some of our team, we have some ins with that world and those kinds of cast members. This show wouldn't be nearly what it is if it weren't for the brilliant cast attached to it.
It's also been really good to have the gang back together. It's lovely to see Pete doing Dionysus again. Over the last two days [of rehearsals], it's been great to see them do their thing. I'm really looking forward to diving into these characters more in rehearsals and seeing where that takes us.
IR: Finally, with just a couple of weeks to go until the Hoxton Hall run begins, what are your feelings towards getting audiences back in to experience the show?
Sebastian: We can't wait to welcome everyone back to the new Thebes! This run, out of all of them, is really audience-led. Hopefully, if we’ve done our job right, there will be some really interesting stuff for people who've seen the show before to enjoy, and we'll be taking care of and respecting the people who are new to the show as well.
Rehearsals for Bacchanalia (2025) Photos: James Lawson
Bacchanalia will run at Hoxton Hall from 11th March to 6th April 2025. Tickets are priced from £54.00 and can be purchased here. For more information about the show, visit sleepwalkimmersive.com
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