Immersive Wolf of Wall Street opening delayed again due to flooding

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/oct/04/immersive-wolf-of-wall-street-opening-delayed-again-due-to-flooding

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An immersive theatre adaptation of The Wolf of Wall Street has postponed its opening night and extended its preview run due to production “setbacks”, after its city of London venue was flooded three times in September.

The Immersive Wolf Of Wall Street was originally due to have its press night on Friday 4 October but in a statement Louis Hartshorn, managing director of production company Hartshorn-Hook, said “setbacks with the building” meant the official opening has been delayed again with no new date confirmed at present.

“Since opening our doors to the public, we have needed to make a number of significant changes to the production and the script is in flux,” the statement read. “We are proud of the show we have now, but it is still very much alive and responding to its audience – bedding in, if you will.”

The statement said that an immersive environment is an “evolving entity” and that the company didn’t want to present a version of the show that would be unrecognisable from its “locked in” form. “We are still at the grindstone,” Hartshorn said.

Hartshorn said they should have received the keys to the building on 1 August but didn’t get access until the week commencing 26 August, and that delay – plus three separate incidents of flooding at its central London site – made postponement inevitable.

In September, the production team behind the Immersive Wolf of Wall Street told the Guardian about the stringent safety procedures put in place after two actors were assaulted by audience members during its immersive production of The Great Gatsby.

Door security, personal alarm buttons, a code-word system to flag problematic audience members, CCTV cameras and a safeguarding, consent and inclusion coordinator are all part of the production which is directed by Alexander Wright, who also helmed The Great Gatsby.

“When it happened in Gatsby, we just came down very hard for the next three days,” Wright said. “At the beginning of the shows we said: ‘All right, look, this has happened to us,’ we laid out the rules and quickly made all the security systems and put them in place.”

Charlotte Bence, an industrial organiser at trade union Equity, said that immersive theatre can be a “nightmare” for actors unless logistics and safety are properly planned. “We have examples of radios not working in massive spaces where performers are by themselves with audience members and there’s no way to get to the security,” she said. “CCTV was being monitored by someone who is doing three or four jobs at the same time.”

The immersive adaptation of the memoir of former Wall Street trader Jordan Belfort, who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Martin Scorsese’s riotous Oscar-nominated film version, invited audiences to dress in “90s American office attire”, promising to explore “the extremes of capitalism and hedonistic behaviour and how obsession with money can bring humanity to its knees”.