Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight (Jacob King/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)Peaky Blinders screenwriter Steven Knight can’t pinpoint the exact moment he realised that the show had exploded.
It might have been when he saw the Peaky Blinders haircuts sprouting up all over the place. Or the rise in the Peaky Blinders-themed weddings.
Then again, it might also have been the moment Snoop Dogg requested to meet him – and flew over from the US to make it happen.
“I spent three hours with Snoop Dogg in this hotel room in Covent Garden,” Knight tells me, “And we talked about Peaky Blinders. And I just thought, ‘Crikey.’”
Though the TV show that captured the attention of the nation – and beyond – has come to an end, the Peaky train is showing no signs of slowing down. And it has a surprise in store: the immersive experience.
Held at the Camden Garrison, Peaky Blinders: The Rise will usher visitors deep into the world of the Shelby family.
Set at the start of a turf war between Tommy Shelby – played in the series by Cillian Murphy – the Italian clan and the Jewish gang headed by Alfie Solomons (Tom Hardy in the show), the audience will be left to plot, drink and gamble the night away in the company of the Shelby family as they seek to control London.
Despite the pandemic, the popularity of immersive work continues to rise.
Immersive theatre pioneer Punchdrunk recently opened its major new show The Burnt City in Woolwich and a new immersive venue is set to open under Waterloo with Alice’s Adventure’s Underground. Secret Cinema has long created immersive experiences for their screenings of much-loved films – they are soon to add one based on TV show Stranger Things to their repertoire– and even Doctor Who has been turned into an immersive show.
To bring such incredibly complex works of staging to life requires organisation, attention to detail and a love of the source material - so it’s just as well that industry veteran Tom Maller is at the helm of this newest of live experiences.
Maller has been the immersive theatre industry’s man of choice for years: he directed Doctor Who’s Time Fracture experience, The Great Gatsby and has helmed countless Secret Cinema shows, making him a clear choice to come on board for Peaky Blinders and help build the world of Birmingham of the 1920s.
“Immersive theatre allows the audiences to escape: lock their world out for two and a half hours and escape into what they love,” he explains. “They can be active rather than passive.”
The whole experience, to which Knight has given his blessing, is aiming to offer audiences the quintessential Peaky experience, where they can change the ending of the show depending on their actions and talk to the Shelbys on their own turf – as well as interact with props from the original show.
How did Maller go about condensing six seasons of epic lore into one night? “I had the privilege as a fan to go through the five seasons over and over again,” he says - the experience was developed before the release of the final season this year.
He was drawn to season two of the show, when the gang were earning hundreds of pounds a day. “They were kind of sorted, but Tommy is ambitious and he wants to take London.
“We found this Grade II-listed horse hospital in Camden Town: Alfie’s territory. And the characters that we have within season two, it felt like that was a story the audience could step into, like a London expansion.”
Knight gave his blessing for the show to go ahead, and is a firm fan of the idea. “It’s a bit like a dream,” he says. “The whole concept is new and great. The way people consume drama has changed now.
“It’s possibly a consequence of gaming where people have got used to being part of the drama on their screen. And I think that open participation in something like this, it’s something new… I love it.”
For Knight, the experience is like a “Christmas present” for fans. “You open it up and there’s all this stuff we can play with, you know, you can do this and you can meet Alfie and you can steal some money from the Peaky Blinders. You can play. And that’s what it’s about. So for me it’s another part of the world and what Peaky has become, it’s been about world-building.”
That participation will not only involve audiences being able to interact with three carefully curated spaces, but with the main characters themselves.
Indeed, one challenge the show faces is the contrast between its versions of Tommy, Arthur and Polly – and the show’s versions, as portrayed by Murphy, Paul Anderson and the late Helen McCrory.
To prepare, the showrunners worked closely with Knight, extracting the nuance from his work to inform the personalities of their characters.
They also dug into the issue of mental health, which is a constant presence in the TV show, with characters struggling in the wake of their involvement in the First World War. To prepare, the cast took a trip to the Imperial War Museum, talked with experts and even engaged in some role play of what life in the trenches was really like.
“We’ve gone into that kind of the deep geek side of what Stephen created, like, ‘Where was Arthur fighting? What would have happened to Arthur? Where’s the whisky from?’” Maller says.
“All the things that Steven’s got in the show, but maybe it’s all in his head: we’ve asked all the questions, we’ve drawn it out just so we can tie things together, because our audience don’t then snap to the next scene, they stay with it.”
Perhaps inevitably, Helen McCrory’s presence also looms large, both in the final season of the original show and in this production.
“I’ve known Helen for so long, have worked with her for so long: she would love this night out. It’s theatre, it’s drama, and it’s taking it to another level,” Knight says. “It’s everything she cared about.”
“Our homage to her would be that she opens the show and closes the show,” Maller adds.
“She is the all-seeing, she’s the owner and she’s the matriarch. And I think I wanted the audience to have that moment, the top and at the end, where we just have her presence again… she is the backbone of everything that we do.”
And once the show is over, I venture, will audiences be hearing about a Peaky Blinders film any time soon?
Knight’s eyes twinkle.
“Just before I came onto the Zoom, I was writing the Peaky film, and when this Zoom ends I’ll go back to it,” he says.
“It’s nearly done. And I’m going to shoot it in Birmingham; in Digbeth. And it’s going to be great. And it’s going to have Cillian and all the usual suspects. So yeah, I’m really looking forward to it.”
Settle in, fans: the Peaky Blinders train rolls on.
