Werewolves, voting booths, and the spirit of regional theatre in Hull

The Fruit Market in Hull does not usually host 350 people who have been told to lie, cheat and seduce their way out of a pyre. On the night of the review, that is exactly what The Night of the Werewolves Live asked of its audience, and — to the visible surprise of the Guardian's critic — most of them obliged with the conviction of born conspirators. The result is a generous five-star notice for a piece of immersive theatre that owes a structural debt to The Traitors television format, dresses the debt in eighteenth-century petticoats, and runs with it.

Regional stages have spent two decades importing London hits. Something quieter is now running in the opposite direction: small companies in cities outside the M25 are building participatory work that travels, sells out, and earns the kind of notice that used to belong only to subsidised flagship venues. The Night of the Werewolves Live is one small data point in that shift. It is also a useful test case for what audiences will do when the room itself becomes the cast.

What the piece actually does

The premise is uncomplicated. Audience members are the unlucky inhabitants of a remote village; a small number of them are, in the language of the form, werewolves. The rest have to identify the infected, vote them on to a pyre, and survive the night without being eaten first. The Traitors parallels are obvious and the review names them; the production leans into the comparison rather than away from it.

What distinguishes the show, on the critic's account, is the volume of stage business required of the room. Bawdy humour is the currency; survival is the goal. The audience is not asked to politely raise a hand. They are asked to scheme, to lie, to flirt, to throw each other under the bus with conviction. The format transforms strangers into a noisy, partisan crowd inside the first twenty minutes.

The Guardian's reviewer flagged a question that recurs in every review of participatory work: "but is it theatre?" The answer the piece gives is to stop pretending the question matters. The show treats the room as material — its embarrassment, its laughter, its willingness to be publicly humiliated — and the result lands closer to a fever-dream village fête than to a Chekhov revival. That is a creative choice, and on the evidence of the notice, it pays.

Why Hull, why now

The regional stage in the United Kingdom has been quietly rebuilding itself around two structural facts. First, Arts Council England funding remains uneven and tilted toward London; second, audiences outside the capital will turn up for a format they have seen on television but never in a room. Immersive theatre — and its louder cousin, immersive gameshow theatre — sits at the intersection of those two facts. It is cheaper to produce than a period drama with a full cast. It travels well, because the format is portable and the local audience does most of the work.

Hull's Fruit Market sits inside a broader Hull 2017-to-present cultural regeneration story, in which the city has used its City of Culture legacy to position itself as a mid-scale venue circuit. The Night of the Werewolves Live is the kind of show that fits that circuit well: scaleable, repeatable, and tolerant of a non-traditional audience. The risk for the regional stage is that the same logic — format-led, audience-as-cast, cheap to re-mount — eventually crowds out the slower, harder work of new writing for a sitting audience.

The counter-read is straightforward. The same formats that train a regional audience to participate in a room also train them to tolerate live performance more broadly. A village-fever-dream tonight is a Shakespeare in the park tomorrow, if the company's pipeline holds. There is no evidence yet that immersive work cannibalises the traditional stage in the regions; there is some evidence that it primes audiences who would otherwise stay home.

The Traitors inheritance

The most interesting structural question the piece raises is not whether it is theatre. It is what immersive work inherits from the broadcast formats it echoes. The Traitivesque architecture — secret identities, group voting, social pressure performed for cameras — was designed for a viewer at home who can pause and replay. The Night of the Werewolves Live strips out the edit and asks the room to perform the pressure in real time. That is a meaningful translation: the show is not so much adapting a game as asking what the game feels like from the inside.

The bawdy register is part of that translation. Television producers know that an audience will tolerate betrayal more easily when the room is already laughing. The same principle operates live. The bawdiness is not decoration; it is a pressure valve that lets the room behave badly without freezing. The critic's five-star notice lands, in part, because the show understands that dynamic and exploits it cleanly.

The broader question — what regional theatre borrows from unscripted television, and what it owes back — does not have a settled answer. The current pipeline runs one way: formats that work on streaming services get rebuilt for rooms. A counter-pipeline, in which stage-first formats feed back into broadcast, has not yet emerged at scale.

Stakes for the regional stage

The piece is a small win for Hull and for the regional touring circuit that supports it. The stakes are larger than one notice. If immersive formats continue to absorb the limited regional touring budget, the slow work of mid-scale new writing — the kind of work that used to tour from the Royal Court or the Almeida to a regional rep — risks being squeezed into fewer slots each season. If, on the other hand, the same formats train a wider regional audience to buy tickets at all, the net effect on the stage is positive.

The Night of the Werewolves Live is, on the available evidence, a smart commercial bet dressed up as a high-camp horror. It runs because the room runs. Whether the regional stage can hold both that kind of show and the quieter, harder kind it was built for is the question that the 2026–27 touring season will begin to answer.

The Guardian's notice is generous. The sources do not specify ticket prices, run length beyond the evening reviewed, or the size of the production company behind the show; those details will determine whether the success travels or stays a one-off.

This piece frames The Night of the Werewolves Live as a structural data point in the regional stage's pivot toward audience-as-cast formats, rather than as a standalone review. Where the wire coverage focused on the room's energy, Monexus has read the show as a test case for what the touring circuit imports next.