The Stage

Exclusive: Duckie to hold summer sleepover in Barbican Pit

Published Thursday 30 September 2010 at 11:27 by Natalie Woolman

Olivier-award winning theatre company Duckie is to stage an all-night sleepover show next summer, during which audiences will be lulled to sleep in the Barbican Pit.

Theatregoers will be able to book a single, double or triple bed to watch performances. Duckie producer Simon Casson said: “We specialise in unusual roles for audiences. We hate the theatre, as in when you go and sit in rows in a darkened room in the stalls and you watch a play on the stage. So we always try to do something else.

“Usually, when you go to the theatre, it is to challenge you and make you excited and keep you awake. But often when I go to the theatre, I fall asleep. So we thought we would make a show that was particularly designed to send you to sleep.”

Audiences will arrive at the venue at 10pm, change into their pyjamas and get into bed before the show starts. The performance segment of the evening will then begin, with the aim of sending everyone to sleep after around 90 minutes.

There will be enough space for 50 sleepers per night and Casson said he hoped everyone would get around seven and a half hours sleep before they are awoken by the performers and given breakfast.

Tickets to the show will cost £42 which, as Casson pointed out, is cheaper than a night in most budget hotels in central London. Casson said he wanted people from outside London to come and spend the night with the show instead of in a hotel.

The show will feature four performers, including Tim Spooner, who said that the brief was a “difficult ask”, adding that it would be hard to break down the audience’s expectation that they should watch the show. Duckie won an Olivier Award in 2004 for C’est Barbican.

Lullaby will run in the Barbican Pit from June 24 to July 24, 2011.