Brick Lane Music Hall stages a new murder mystery musical, The Pleasures of Fanny, from 2-6 October 2026, with the audience seated at tables and asked to name the killer over lunch, afternoon tea or dinner.
Brick Lane Music Hall opens a new murder mystery musical next month. The Pleasures of Fanny runs at the Silvertown venue from 2-6 October 2026, with press night on Saturday 3 October, and it is written by Shannon Rewcroft and Jack Pallister, both of whom also appear in it.
The conceit is a show within a show. A fictional amateur company, the Silvertown Lovies Amateur Group, is staging its own musical, loosely drawn from John Cleland's 18th-century novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, in which a young woman comes to London to make her fortune. A killing interrupts proceedings. After the interval a second body forces the building into lockdown, and the search for the culprit passes to the audience.
Each table works as its own investigating team, comparing motives and movements and submitting a verdict before the murderer is named. The production is set in the 1940s, and audiences are invited to dress for the period, with prizes for the best turned out. Doing so is optional.
The cast is Shannon Rewcroft, Ross Tomlinson, Lucy Reed, Andrew Robley, Vincent Hayes, Jack Pallister and Annabelle Fage. Hayes founded Brick Lane Music Hall in 1992 and received an MBE for services to British music hall in 2013. Rewcroft's stage credits include Build a Rocket on tour and At Last, It's Summer at the London Palladium; Tomlinson has appeared in The Unseen at Riverside Studios and on screen in This Is Going to Hurt; Pallister took the 2024 Carl Alan Award for theatre choreography; and Fage, a Mountview graduate who has performed for Disney Cruise Line, makes her debut at the venue.
Lucy Hayes, executive director of Brick Lane Music Hall, said: "We want people to come along, enjoy a fantastic meal and a really entertaining show, and then suddenly find themselves having to work out who might be a murderer. It's enormous fun, whether you're a seasoned detective or completely hopeless at spotting whodunnit."
Zara Kattan, artistic director, said: "Music hall has always been about bringing people together for a really good night out, and that's what we want Brick Lane Music Hall to be today. We're introducing Sunday performances for the first time and we really want people who perhaps haven't thought that music hall was for them before to come through the doors and discover that it absolutely can be."
The piece sits inside an autumn season that mixes returning titles with new work, and which adds Sunday performances to the venue's schedule for the first time.
Every performance comes with a meal. Afternoon tea performances start from £45, with doors at 1.15pm and the show running from 2pm to 5pm, tea served in the interval. Lunchtime performances start from £55, with doors at 12.15pm, lunch at 12.45pm and the show from 2.30pm to 5pm. Evening performances start from £59.99, with doors at 5.30pm, dinner at 6.30pm, the show from 8.15pm to 10.30pm and dancing until midnight. Brick Lane Music Hall is on Silvertown Way in London E16.
