CircleandStar

CircleandStar CIRCLE AND STAR theatre - Hampstead

09/09/2026

He only ever finished one album.

On Tuesday 6 October, Grace gets a whole evening.

01 · The story — Jonathan Wingate opens the record up: the voice, the songs he borrowed and made his own, how a debut from 1994 still sounds like a cathedral with the doors thrown open.

02 · The music — Betty Lou sings Lilac W**e live, a few feet from you. Later in the evening, you hear him sing it.

03 · The album — Grace, in full. Lights down, phones away, Hallelujah at track six.

04 · The visuals — a world built for this record alone, one for every song, moving across the screens as it plays.

All of it in one room, with fifty-four other people who came for the same record.
Sleeve Notes Nº.003 · The Listening Salon at Circle & Star, Hampstead.

🗓 Tuesday 6 October 2026 · Doors 7:00pm · Side A 7:30pm
📍 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3
🎟 £22 · 55 seats only — link in bio
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05/09/2026

Smell touches our hidden selves. It retrieves vanished rooms, reclaims forgotten scenarios. It signals safety and danger, love and fear, life and death, all before the conscious mind can catch up.

For one night, Katie Puckrik does this on purpose — ten times over. The History of the World in 10 Smells is an exploration of time, space and emotion, told through the one sense you can’t switch off: a playful scratch’n’sniff journey across pop culture, psychology, history, science and s*x, led entirely by the nose. Ten smells, passed round the room one at a time, and the stories each one drags in behind it. One species, explained.

It sold out the first time. It comes back for one more night.

FIELD NOTES № 001 — The Thinking Salon Thursday 8 October 2026 Doors 7:00pm · show 7:30pm, one sitting · then Q&A 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3 · £22 · 55 seats

Perfumes kindly provided by Bloom Perfumery.

Tickets — smell.circleandstar.live

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A first for us, and a privilege.In November this room has its first conjuror.Circle & Star was built around proximity. F...
04/09/2026

A first for us, and a privilege.

In November this room has its first conjuror.

Circle & Star was built around proximity. Fifty-five tiered seats and no back of the room — fifty-five front rows. No amplification. No distance between you and the work. Proximity theatre, and we meant every word of it.

Then a magician asks to come, and you find out what you actually built.

Sleight of hand is the one art that cannot survive distance. No trapdoors, no smoke, no mirrors, no camera to cut away at the useful moment — two hands, a few simple objects, and nowhere to hide. It has to be watched close, or it isn’t happening at all.

Luke Jermay brings In Search of Magic to Heath Street for three nights — up the Victorian staircase, into a room of fifty-five, close enough to see his fingers work and still not close enough to catch them.

We didn’t design this room for a conjuror. It turns out we did.

Fri 6 · Sat 7 · Sun 8 November · 7.30pm · £30
28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3 · Hampstead Station, Northern line
Tickets — link in bio.

STEP IN. COME UP. BE PART OF THE STORY.

Twice in one evening, a name will be said out loud in a room of 55 people — and nowhere else.Season Two of VOICES launch...
04/09/2026

Twice in one evening, a name will be said out loud in a room of 55 people — and nowhere else.

Season Two of VOICES launched on a promise — no names on the bill until closer to the night.

It’s closer to the night.

VOICES is back — the most talked-about night we do.

So — October. The bill Guy Chambers has built —

Jessica Sweetman Jessica Sweetman — started at fifteen, singing in cigar bars. She’s opened for Van Morrison, Hozier and Keane; this autumn she’s on tour with Alfie Boe, Royal Albert Hall included. In this room, you’ll hear the breath before the note.

Christy O’Donnell Christy — Scottish, back after a few years away. Elton John’s Rocket signed him. A new album is coming, and a film, 88Keys, with him in the lead. Second acts sound different this close.

One World Orchestra One World Orchestra — a collective of musicians from across the world, playing global traditions against contemporary songwriting, much of it improvised. Off stage they work with thousands of people across the UK. Here — 55 at a time.

Three acts. Three songs each — one you’ll know, one you won’t, one you never saw coming.

And a fourth name.

The one we’re keeping.

Not printed here. Not told at the door. It gets said on the night — and not a moment before.

If you want to know, be in the room.

Season One sold out every month. The room won’t get bigger — so the night does. October runs twice — same evening, two sittings — 6pm and 8pm.

VOICES · Season Two, Nº.1 of three
Hosted and curated by Guy Chambers Guy Chambers
Wednesday 28 October 2026 — sittings at 6:00pm and 8:00pm
55 seats a sitting · £29.50
Circle & Star Theatre, 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3
30 seconds from Hampstead Station, Northern Line
Tickets — voices.circleandstar.live
Then — 25 November · 16 December

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NEAL WHITMOREYou may know him as Neal X — the guitarist who brought an unmistakable flash of futuristic rock ’n’ roll to...
03/09/2026

NEAL WHITMORE

You may know him as Neal X — the guitarist who brought an unmistakable flash of futuristic rock ’n’ roll to Sigue Sigue Sputnik and their 1986 hit Love Missile F1-11.

Since then, Neal has spent more than three decades playing alongside Marc Almond, as well as working with Adam Ant and forming bands including The Montecristos and The Loveless. A life lived inside music: glam, punk, rock ’n’ roll and everything strange and brilliant between.

For our second SLEEVE NOTES evening, Neal brought something quieter into the room: an Appalachian dulcimer.

It was the instrument Joni Mitchell used to write four of the songs on Blue. Neal showed us how its unusual open tunings create that delicate, ringing sound — before the lights went down and fifty-five of us listened to the album together, from beginning to end.

One musician helping us hear another musician’s work differently.

That is exactly what SLEEVE NOTES is for.

Thank you, Neal.

One album. One room. Heard in full.

sleevenotes.circleandstar.live

31/08/2026

December is a little over three months away, and this is the one we’d tell you not to miss.

Thursday 17th December. One night, fifty-five seats, and a film almost nobody has seen.

The Small World of Sammy Lee — Soho, 1963. Anthony Newley as a strip-club compère with five hours to find three hundred pounds, running the length of his own small world: bookies, brothers, last favours. Ken Hughes wrote it and directed it, out of his own television play. Wolfgang Suschitzky shot it on the real streets — eight years before he shot Get Carter. Most of the Soho in it has since been knocked-about or priced out, so the film is now the only place some of those doorways still exist.

The critics of 1963 walked straight past it. They were wrong. It is, arguably, Newley at his pomp — the same year the song he co-wrote took the Grammy for Song of the Year, he made a black-and-white picture about a man with nothing left, and gave the performance he should be remembered for.

Jason Solomons presents the evening. Director, Film critic, broadcaster and author — former chairman of the London Film Critics’ Circle, a fixture on Robert Elms’ BBC Radio London show for over fifteen years, the man who wrote Trailer Trash for the Observer, and who hasn’t missed a Cannes since 1997.

Tara Newley joins him. Writer, broadcaster and producer — a columnist for the Sunday Times, the Express and OK!, a radio voice on Capital, LBC and Talk Radio, and the author of Radio Honey. She is Anthony Newley and Joan Collins’s daughter — and she was born in 1963, the year of the film.

Plus a few little surprises on the night…

A talk first. Then a discussion. Then the picture, in full, in a room of fifty-five — lights low, phones away, watched in company, the way a film like this was meant to be seen.

Thursday 17th December 2026 · Doors 6:45pm · Talk 7:00 · Film 8:00
£22 · 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3 · Hampstead Station, Northern Line.

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🔗 reelnotes.circleandstar.live

30/08/2026

The 1818 story, narrated live by Madeline Smith — who once stood opposite Peter Cushing in Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. An original score performed live to picture by Jason Frederick. Projection, lighting, smoke.

Two nights in gothic Hampstead. Fifty-five seats between you and 1818.

This is DARK MATTERS at Circle & Star.

🗓 Thu 22 October 2026 · Doors 7:30pm · Show 8:00pm
🗓 Fri 23 October 2026 · Doors 7:30pm · Show 8:00pm
📍 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3
🎟 55 seats only — link in bio
STEP IN. COME UP. BE PART OF THE STORY.

Marilyn Monroe would have turned one hundred this year.Everyone knows the face. The myth has had a century to harden aro...
29/08/2026

Marilyn Monroe would have turned one hundred this year.

Everyone knows the face. The myth has had a century to harden around it — and for two nights in October, JoJo Desmond goes looking for the woman underneath.

The Marilyn Monroe Story is a cabaret documentary: thirteen songs drawn from Marilyn’s own films, sung live, with costume changes, dance, dialogue and projection. Not an impression. An evening that takes the myth apart to see what it was built on.

The triumphs and the tragedies. What fame asked of her, and what Hollywood took. Where the “casting couch” began. And a death that has never stopped being argued over.

Fifty-five seats, close enough to watch it land.

🗓 Thursday 1st & Friday 2nd October 2026 · Doors 7:30pm · Show 8:00pm
📍 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3 · Hampstead Station · Northern Line
🎟️ £23.50 · 55 seats a night, all good ones — link in bio

Contains adult themes.

Jojo Desmond

STEP IN. COME UP. BE PART OF THE STORY.

IT’S ALIVE — and this is the one to clear your diary for.FRANKENSTEIN — UNCHAINED. An interactive visual, music and effe...
27/08/2026

IT’S ALIVE — and this is the one to clear your diary for.

FRANKENSTEIN — UNCHAINED. An interactive visual, music and effects night at the Circle & Star. Two nights only.

Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece, read live in extracts by classic horror icon Madeline Smith — Hammer’s Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell, The Vampire Lovers, and Bond’s Live and Let Die — with a new original soundtrack performed live to picture, in real time, by Jason Frederick.

Projection. Lighting. Smoke moving through the dark. Fifty-five seats, and not one of them far from it.

A horror happening, in the gothic splendour of an October evening — in the heart of Hampstead, where Mary Shelley herself passed a winter with Leigh and Marianne Hunt while the book was still unfinished. Two hundred and nine years later, it comes back up the hill.

Scott Neilson has made a limited edition of the poster — museum-archival paper, vibrant inks, signed and numbered by hand. Fifty-five prints, one for every seat. Profit from every one goes to nurses, and to local organisations supporting cancer patients and their families.

🗓 Thursday 22nd October 2026 · Doors 7:30pm · Show 8:00pm
🗓 Friday 23rd October 2026 · Doors 7:30pm · Show 8:00pm
📍 28 Heath Street, Hampstead NW3 · thirty seconds from Hampstead Station
🎟 £20 · 55 seats only — link in bio

STEP IN. COME UP. BE PART OF THE STORY.

Address

28 Heath Street
London
NW36TE

Telephone

+447748786136

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