The 2025 London Lovecraft festival is once again descending upon the nation’s capitol! With four events and five original performances, we guarantee your itch for the weird will be scratched. This year’s incarnation features a mixture of storytelling, puppetry, and interactive performances, with three Lovecraft stories (From Beyond, Celephais, The Statement of Randolph Carter) getting their first turn on the festival floor.
Sunday starts strong with a 2 PM interactive work, “Painting Pickman’s Model,” a “life drawing class with a difference.” Attendees will not be sitting on chairs in silence, but participating in creating art, and in having a discussion on what it is that actually makes a monster and other topics close to the heart of the Lovecraft crowd. This event is being run by Leo Doulton, who last year took the audience on a tour of the Dreamlands, with some folks mapping, some chanting, some channelling, and some piloting through the mountains, rivers, and forests. “Leo’s piece made me think I wanted to take the festival in a different direction, “ says LLF festival founder T.L. Wiswell. “Way back in the first year our Innsmouth gave people the chance to be cultists, but no one else ever took a show that way again. When I heard of the ‘Uncanny Things’ pieces Leo was doing (opera leaning, audience driven summoning/performance art) and also the “Key of Dreams” weekenders, I was so excited about what kind of experiences we could create by removing the fourth wall and having people be IN a different world, or perhaps just a more interesting version of this world. In this case, Pickman has been done so many times … but this event seemed to actually add something new, a chance to really think about horror and evil. I’ve already got a sketchbook picked out.”
At the heart of Sunday night (7PM) is the multi-story “Night Beneath the Elder Sign,” an event that lets shorter Lovecraft works come together in one glorious wave of fear (with breaks to refill your pint). T.L. kicks it off with, “Celephais,” a short story from the Dreamlands cycle visited so notably in her shadow puppet “The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath.” “This past summer I went to the Necronomicon (a Lovecraft fan and academic festival) in Providence, Rhode Island, and had a chance to see the places that inspired Lovecraft’s work,” says Wiswell. “A bus ride away was Newport, where the gilded age ‘Robber Barons’ built their summer cottages 20-30 years before HP, and I learned about Consuela Vanderbilt and her tragic life. Seeing the actual “Shunned House” that HP wrote about in Providence made me think he would have known and probably visited Newport, and I wanted to take this slice of a decaying culture and fit it into his story world. I think the combination of Gilded Age America, steampunk aesthetics, and Blitz era London will work together well.”
“Celephais” is paired with “From Beyond,” selected by Kai R Hastur, who comes to LLF GHQ after two previous sold out festival performances, 2023’s “Shroud of Charon” and 2024’s “The Music of Eric Zann.” “I’ve got an original work I’ll want to bring next year, but for ‘A Night Beneath the Elder Sign’ I wanted something mid-length and less well known. It’s a great story and I think the festival audience will really enjoy it.”
“Kai is a strong performer and he really gets what we’re doing and connects with the audience,” adds Wiswell. “I’ve been wanting to have another coproducer and his ultra-creepy Zann was brilliant. I figure if I want to watch him on stage, he’s definitely got the vibe right.”
Sunday night finishes at 9 PM with Laurence Ashcroft reading “At the Mountains of Madness.” Ashcroft’s extremely fine voice was put to great use for the 2024 “Elder Sign” when he was part of Shivers’ performance of “The Voice in the Night,” William Hope Hodgson’s epic of foggy nights, abandoned ships, and fungal overlords. This time he’s been given his own festival slot, with one of the most requested tales from the oeuvre (yes Lovecraft has an oeuvre). Pack your parkas and watch out for the penguins!
The terror takes off again on Monday, when we have our second interactive work, Leo Doulton’s “The Estate Sale of Randolph Carter.” Attendees will be bidding on a variety of occult artifacts found after Randoph Carter’s unfortunate departure from this plane of existence. “It almost sounds like a LARP,” says Wiswell, “but it’s interactive theater, where you as the audience are telling the story to other people. I’m not entirely sure how it will work, but when I got Leo’s proposal, I loved it enough that I decided to use this year’s New Writing Competition purse to fund it. Lovecraft fans are hungry for new experiences, to not just see the stories, but to live them. And after the BBC dramatization of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” I felt like there was enough room to branch out for our weird fiction fans. Also, he needed a full evening to do it, not just a one hour slot, but with a short festival we could make this happen. This show is new, original, and organized by someone who knows how to make an exciting event where you feel like you’re pushing at the boundaries between worlds. I can’t wait.”
The Fifth London Lovecraft Festival will be at the Drayton Arms Theater in South Kensington London, from 16-17 February, 2025. Tickets range from £12-25.
Programme:
Sunday 16 February
2 PM: Painting Pickman’s Model
7 PM: A Night Beneath the Elder Sign (Celephais and From Beyond)
9 PM: At the Mountains of Madness
Monday 17 February
7:30 PM: The Estate Sale of Randolph Carter
Tickets are here: https://www.thedraytonarmstheatre.co.uk/
Up to date information is here: https://www.facebook.com/londonlovecraft/
Slightly out of date information is here: https://londonlovecraft.com/