We sat down for a quick chat with Alexander Knott about his upcoming project, The Highgate Vampire, a riotous new dark comedy set in London, 1970 – where a Vampire lurks in the shadows of Highgate Cemetery. https://www.omnibus-clapham.org/the-highgate-vampire/#BookNow
What first drew you to the legend of the Highgate Vampire?
James first came to me with the idea. It started in a technical rehearsal for another play entirely, three years ago (BoxLess Theatre’s ‘Ballooniana!’)
At the time his mind should have been on his music, but James said “I’ve read about this strange true story. A Priest and a Tobacconist. Except he only ran the tobacco shop in the daytime. By night he was a vampire hunter. And they both set out to destroy the Vampire that was terrorising Highgate. 1970s, this was. And they met to have a duel. A Magician’s Duel, they called it. On some blasted heath somewhere. To see who was the winner.”
Then he said – “That’s good, that. Isn’t it?”
It didn’t take too long, no more than thirty seconds, to see that yes, that was good. That was very good.
So it started from there, really. From that idea, and we ran with it, changing the names and some of the details as we went – but still more of it is true than we would like!
You co-wrote The Highgate Vampire – what’s your process like as collaborators?
As a company, we’ve been making theatre since 2017. Slightly before. We went to drama school together. The full ‘Withnail & I’.
Ryan Hutton and myself are the joint directors, James Demaine acts, writes, plays music, designs sound and so does Samuel Heron. Over the years we’ve all been in them, we’ve all written them.
We have an idea and sometimes the writing starts immediately. Sometimes we talk about it a while. Once talked about for seven years and wrote about three different versions of it. Often we improv, but not in tight t shirts with miming. We improv sat down while typing. Back and forth. We redraft. We make original music (well, Sam & James do). One of our previous shows – ‘The Messiah Complex’ at VAULT Festival – was in the process of drafting and redrafting intermittently for seven years.
So it’s all a very collaborative effort, and on this one it was a lot of James and I improvising and typing over the keyboard and cutting or rewriting sections in rehearsals.
Did you know from the start that you’d also be performing the piece yourselves, or did that evolve as the script developed?
More or less from the word go, we knew we’d be playing the characters. One or both of us might have made noises at various times about getting someone else in, but the more you write in the way we do, the more attached you become to the characters.
And they sit very comfortably in our casting brackets too – James has played a lot of drunks or philosophers (or drunken philosophers) in his time, with a side line in the role of his own Grandfather, who was buried alive in WW2 Italy in ‘Buried’ (2020).
For my part, when I was in my younger and more vulnerable years, I was either the gawky posh boy next door or playing Kings and Princes in Shakespeare or aristocrats in Noel Coward. So now, both of us in our 30s, we’re playing a pagan shaman who runs a tobacconist’s shop and a Demon-Hunting Catholic Priest with a bit of an anger management issue.
So we fit our roles well, we’d say.
Bag of Beard Theatre has a reputation for bold, inventive work. How does The Highgate Vampire fit into your journey as a company?
Our old drama school building was a down at heel Edwardian Hospital-cum-Hotel-cum-Morgue in South London which was, for decades, dedicated exclusively to the education of young actors by throwing a smorgasbord of theatrical methods at the proverbial wall and seeing what stuck and what slid down it.
Three years of this, and we were a theatre company. The name Bag of Beard comes from the fact that I kept a paper bag full of false beard in my locker for a Jacobean tragedy. A literal bag of beard.
Our first shows were ‘Bath’ (The Bread & Roses Theatre, 2017), a 60s comedy thriller, centring around a lost briefcase of money and a tin bath, definitely shades of Harold Pinter and Jez Butterworth. More recently, we’ve had ‘December’ (Old Red Lion Theatre as an online film and subsequently at the Park Theatre, renamed ‘Cratchit’), which is Bob Cratchit’s own version of what happened on the night of A Christmas Carol.
We were lucky enough to be part of the final VAULT Festival with ‘The Messiah Complex’ in 2023, a psychological thriller about a world where all religion is banned by a brutal science-led authority. Our work always has a touch of dark humour, and The Highgate Vampire is one of those plays that is just an outright comedy. Every line is a joke, or a set up to a joke.
We don’t think we’ll always do one genre or another, we want to stay flexible and turn our hand to whatever fires our collective imagination, but we’ve gone from something very dark in 2023 to something much more vaudeville this time.
What do you hope people walk away saying after the show?
We hope they are fascinated with this strange piece of weird but true history – you will not BELIEVE how much of the strange tale is bang on true, just have a Google after the show – have, we hope, a big laugh and frankly, a nice time at Christmas. That’s what we want for this one. The play has some deeper themes about friendship, with philosophical musings about the nature of the spiritual realm (I mean, it is set in the 70s) but ultimately it’s a good time. A slightly spooky, slightly mad, good time. We hope they say “How much of that was true?”. Reader – more than you would believe.