This sermon like no other has the audience singing hallelujah.
Hitting the Soho Theatre with the confidence of a street preacher and the colour scheme of a drag queen, House of Life gets the clergy on their feet with their joyful brand of uplifting entertainment. Led duly by our kaftan-wearing leader ‘The Raverend’ (Ben Welch), with assistance from ‘Trev’ (Lawrence Cole), his musically gifted curate.
The show is a sparkly mashup of an evangelical mega church service from America’s heartland, a chakra-aligning hippie hang out, and an oddball cabaret at a queer night club. There’s some serious crowd work from our Raverend as he shifts about the pews, getting us to shower a new victim with love. There’s a lot of interaction not just between Welch and the crowd, but between the crowd itself. We’re asked to sing a funky mantra to a stranger, share something we admire about the friends we’ve come with, we become a brood of hens in a coop — more on that later.
This level of communal interaction is seemingly at the core of the House of Life’s purpose, to embrace a humanist universality, to reclaim an assured love for the self and to warmly embrace our fellow human. It’s pretty uplifting stuff, and the charming pair certainly convinces us of the life-changing impact of their gospel. There’s reflection on the drudgery of the outside world too. According to the House of Life, we are the chosen chicks of a loving mother hen, destined to find purpose beyond the hen house as we peck and flap in unison. Getting in on the silliness is more or less essential, hand-sitters need not apply.
The sermon isn’t all smooth sailing however. Some demons do arise the further we dig, their revelations are handled a little inelegantly as we swerve from the glittery to the gritty. But House of Life isn’t necessarily about the specificities of what is and isn’t examined within our time in the church, it’s what we’ll take home from the sermon. And despite some dramaturgical bumps with the meta nature of an interactive show, it is certainly the closest one can have to a sparkling rebirth at the theatre.