Forging a nearly 10-year legacy as one of the top players in its field, the company has recently launched its most ambitious project to date, taking audiences into the decadent glamour of the late 19th-century Paris Bohemian nightlife. Guillermo Nazara chats with one of the founders to learn more about the show’s development and how they’ve clawed their way to turn their greatest dream into a reality.
How does it feel to bring this brand-new production to The Lost Estate?
It feels amazing to bring CHAT NOIR! to life at The Lost Estate. It’s been a project that’s been in the works for a very long time, and it’s also our most ambitious experience yet, both from a design and a performance perspective. The hospitality is more refined, and I think the space itself feels more immersive and transporting than almost any other experience we’ve made.
How did the idea for the show come about?
In two ways. We’d heard the story of Le Chat Noir and found it really compelling, and we did some surveying with our audiences to figure out what shows they would like us to make next. We gave them a whole bunch of options, and overwhelmingly the one they came back with was CHAT NOIR!.
The thing that tipped it over the line for us was when we started considering music, which is such a core voice for us at The Lost Estate. We had this idea of bringing to life the great French Romantic music in an unexpected way through a kind of ragtag gypsy band, so you have all the music you know and love by Debussy, Satie, and Bizet, but performed in this energetic, chaotic, wonderful way.
What attracted you to the Parisian bohemian nightlife from a creative perspective?
Parisian nightlife at that time feels like the culmination of a unique moment in history. The artistic scene in Paris in the late 1890s was free and bohemian and idealistic and whimsical, but it was also a moment where an extraordinary concentration of artists came together at once.
You had poets, artists, musicians, and mime artists all gathering together in one place at the original Le Chat Noir, which is unusual. We rarely see all the great artists of the world culminating in one central location. That was part of what made Paris such a fascinating place at the time.
The show will immerse audiences into the decadent glamour of the world’s first cabaret space. What level of historical accuracy have you put into its theming?
There is a huge level of historical accuracy that comes into what we do, and I would say it’s fundamental to what makes The Lost Estate special. Every element of the club has been researched and grounded in what could genuinely have happened at that time.
Everything from the fact that all of the central performers in CHAT NOIR! are performers who actually performed at the original Le Chat Noir, to the food, which is exactly what you would have been eating at that time. Absinthe, for example, is one of the highlights of our cocktail menu because that was the key drink associated with the club.
That level of historical research is important because authenticity adds a layer of depth that’s hard to describe. Whether audiences are consciously aware of it or not, you feel it.
Have you taken any artistic licences?
Yes, of course. What we do is start with history and start with what genuinely happened, and then we often ask ourselves two questions. The first is: what could have happened? And then the more whimsical question is: what should have happened?
The show absolutely has a degree of artistic licence to it, but it’s grounded in the facts of the research we’ve done. All the performances by the mime artists or the magician, for example, are rooted in tricks and techniques that would have existed at that time, but they’re presented in a fresh and contemporary way for a modern audience.
One of the production’s highlights is its haute cuisine-inspired menu, which creates an interesting contrast between this style of food’s bourgeois origins and the setting’s more free-spirited vibe. What’s the reason behind merging both worlds?
The menu is deeply rooted in French gastronomy of the time, and we tried to pick out ingredients and techniques and recipes that were available then. Fundamentally, dishes like Coq au Vin are very rustic, and what we’ve tried to do is take those simple recipes, which rely on the quality of ingredients and the quality of technique applied to them, and present them in a way that feels contemporary.
Our Coq au Vin is a deconstructed Coq au Vin, but it’s still born from that simple rustic food that would have existed at the time.
The show pays homage to some of France’s greatest 19th-century composers, from an abridged rendition of Bizet’s Carmen to the music of Erik Satie, who is also featured as a character. What are the reasons behind choosing these names and works in particular?
The reason we’ve chosen music like Bizet or Satie goes back to that element of research and what genuinely happened at the time. If you want to feel like you’ve been transported back to 1890s Paris, you need to feel like you’re witnessing the music that people were consuming at that point, performed by the people who would have been performing it.
What’s interesting about bringing someone like Erik Satie to life as a character in the show is that he was the pianist in residence at the original Le Chat Noir. He composed some of his most remarkable music there, and that level of depth and authenticity makes the music feel like a more believable part of the world, which in turn makes the world itself feel more believable.
What’s the show’s developmental process been like? How have all the elements come together?
The development of Lost Estate shows is complex and has many moving parts, but one of the key things we always begin with is an experience map. Our central creative document is a giant timeline that maps out the guest journey from doors opening to when they leave the building.
We start adding all the different elements onto that timeline- hospitality, performance, design, and operations -which gives us a sense of how the experience should feel. As the show develops, those teams come together and gradually build the experience as a whole.
Ultimately there is no substitute for having performers and hospitality teams in the space and actually running the experience. We do a huge amount of testing before opening to the public, and that’s a critical part of the process.
How much has the show evolved from the original concept to what’s presented now?
I think the show has stayed very faithful to the original concept. The main thing we wanted to create from the beginning was an evening built around contrast and surprise.
Rodolphe Salis famously believed that as soon as people think they understand something, you should make it completely the opposite. That idea of contrast became central to the experience.
The three sections of the show- Art, Absinthe, and Anarchy -all feel connected, but they’re completely unexpected in relation to one another. You don’t anticipate where the evening is going to go next. The dreamlike atmosphere of the Absinthe section is completely different to the absurdity and chaos of the final section, and that sense of surprise was something we set out to achieve from the very beginning.
Have you found any particular creative challenges along the way?
One thing we do brilliantly at The Lost Estate is use creativity and resourcefulness as a kind of superpower. Magic is a good example of that. One option is to throw huge amounts of money at trying to create spectacle, but another option is to use constraint as a positive creative influence on the work.
What we’ve ended up with is something resourceful, creative, and deeply unexpected. One of the biggest surprises for us was how funny the show became. We knew it would be chaotic and anarchic, particularly in the final section, but we didn’t fully realise how funny it was until we started seeing audiences experience it.
Are there any other highlights in the show that you’d like to flag?
For me, the highlight of the show is the central moment in the second act. Lost Estate experiences usually have a single moment that acts as the emotional and thematic apex of the experience — the moment where audiences feel like they’ve understood the meaning of the show in its purest form.
In CHAT NOIR!, that’s a sequence built around Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. It’s a dreamlike, sensual and poetic piece of music, and the staging around it is unbelievably still and delicate.
You have this beautiful faun figure on stage being observed by a mime, and the whole thing unfolds at a slow, subtle pace. It’s abstract and whimsical and emotional and magical all at once. For me, it’s the moment where the themes and emotions of the whole show come together most clearly.
Why should audiences come and see CHAT NOIR!?
Fundamentally, what we’re trying to do with CHAT NOIR! is create magical moments of humanity.
We live in a noisy, chaotic, digital world where it can sometimes feel difficult to connect to one another, and I think music, art, and cabaret are deeply human experiences that remind us what it means to be human.
CHAT NOIR! is filled with art, music, craftsmanship, thought, care, and skill, all created by real people. Hopefully, audiences leave feeling transported, but also feeling more connected to one another afterwards. That’s fundamentally what we hope to do.
Read our review of CHAT NOIR! here!
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CHAT NOIR! plays at London’s The Lost Estate until September 2026. Tickets are available on the following link.