Tennessee Williams's Hotel Plays, The Langham Hotel

If immersive theatre-maestros Punchdrunk have taught us anything, it’s that London can’t get enough of site-specific theatre. And if anyone deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as them when it comes to the art of transplanting theatre from stage to ‘real world’– it’s the Defibrillator theatre company.

Their Hotel Plays – a suite of three short works by Tennessee Williams – opened at Holborn’s Grange Hotel in 2012 to the rapture of critics who were quick to point out the appropriateness of this quirky venue-based conceit: hotels were a recurrent motif in Williams’s life as well as his work.

Now, back by popular demand, The Hotel Plays are being resurrected in the suites of the West End’s Langham – Europe’s first Grand Hotel and guest-house to the modern day A-List. 

No-one writes heartbreak better than Tennessee Williams. The three short plays, played back-to-back in a 90-minute cycle, are: Green Eyes - a story of young love against the backdrop of war; Sunburst - about the theft of a diamond of that name; and The Pink Bedroom – the bitter tale of an x who puts an end to an 8 year-long affair with a cossetted mistress. The site-specific experience of the three takes the audience to three separate suites over three floors of The Langham.

The cast, too, is star-studded. The beautiful Helen George, star of TV’s Call the Midwife, takes the lead inThe Pink Bedroom. Aisling Loftus from the series Mr Selfridge opens in Green Eyes and young Jake Mann, one of our hottest ones-to-watch and recent star of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Richard II with David Tennant, appears in Sunburst. 

We caught up with some of the cast ahead before the curtain (or indeed hotel room door) opened on 11 February. The whole of the Hotel Plays experience, they said, is "full of brilliant qualities". We’re inclined to believe them. Defibrillator’s first staging of this triptych received huge acclaim, as did their Finborough Theatre productions Hard Feelings and Blue Surge. Time Out have described them as "a deeply impressive new theatre company."