Time seems to have stood still at Dennis Severs’ House. Its four-poster bed has been left unmade, half-empty glasses of wine sit on the table and breakfast has been only partly eaten. It’s as if its 18th-century residents have only just departed. Yet, astonishingly, these interiors were created in the 1980s, by an American with a vision of history drawn largely from watching British costume dramas on TV. The house, in the Spitalfields area of London, remains one of the city’s sublime eccentric gems – and it is about to evolve once more, with a new tour that tells the story of Severs himself and of the glorious queer lives of those who lived with him.
Severs was a blond Californian surfer boy fresh out of college when he arrived in London in 1967. It was there that he found the freedom to live openly as a gay man. With an inborn sense of theatricality and a well-tailored coachman’s outfit, Severs was a natural showman who hosted tours around London in an open carriage. After he spied the opportunity in 1979 to buy the then decrepit house for just £18,000, he moved in with little more than a bedroll, a candlestick and a chamber pot – then swiftly embarked upon a camp, do-it-yourself aesthetic, conjuring the interiors as his fantasia on historical themes.
From the moment he acquired his house, Severs opened it for tours. It did not matter that it was of no special historical significance because he just made stories up as he went along. He shepherded groups around by candlelight for up to three and a half hours while he grew more extravagant in his flights of fancy, seeking to evoke what he called “atmospheres”.
His improvised tales centred around the heteronormative fictional tale of the Jervis family – Huguenot silk weavers who, he explained, had lived there through three generations. He had no patience with participants who were less than rapturous: they were ejected on to the pavement and their money thrown into the street after them. Severs was an innovator, breaking new ground in employing poetic means to evoke the past. He acquired a cult following among creatives, including David Hockney and Derek Jarman, and high-status celebrities including Princess Margaret and Lady Bird Johnson.
The reputation of Dennis Severs’ House was forged by these tours, hosted from 1979 until 1999. Yet that was only one aspect of Severs’ life. He would host his heritage tours by day, then cruise leather bars and sex clubs by night. His house, then, served another function: as a steam-punk seduction machine. Anecdotes are still recounted of his legendary sex parties, including how he once entertained the entire male chorus of a famous ballet company.
Severs succumbed to Aids in 1999. No tours took place after that for more than 20 years. Then, when the house reopened after lockdown, I was commissioned to reimagine them and start again.
It was a formidable act to follow. The challenge was how to remain true to the spirit of Severs’ original tours but speak to an audience today. We live in a very different world now, and promenade or “immersive” theatre has evolved too. Drawing on some fragmentary sound recordings of Severs – and my personal experience of writing and directing plays at the Royal Court and National Theatre in the 80s and 90s – I devised a play script of 90 minutes entitled Dennis Severs’ Tour, which followed the same fictional narrative, only reinvented for our time.
Working at first with actor Joel Saxon, and then with two others, Lisa D’Agostino and Beko Wood, we explored what theatrical performers could bring to the experience. We soon discovered that not only could they embody the spirits of each of the fictional residents of the house that Severs invented, they also brought their own skills, in particular a sophisticated linguistic dexterity which allowed the performance to become a virtuoso endeavour. Audiences are limited to seven and we perform at night by candlelight, following in the footsteps of Severs through the 10 rooms of the house and through 300 years. These performances have been running six times a week for over three years now, and I must confess we have not had occasion to throw anyone out yet.
Emboldened by this success, we have now turned the idea on its head for Simon’s Story, which explores the lives of Severs and the small circle of men who lived with him and created the house as we know it. For them it was a place of refuge, consolation and personal freedom, at a time when HIV and Aids was inducing existential terror in a generation of gay men.
This is a parallel story to Severs’ fiction yet it is certainly no less dramatic. In Simon’s Story we portray Severs through his relationship with Simon Pettet, as told by Patrick Handscombe who lived in the house at the time. Pettet was an 18-year-old art student when he was picked up by Severs outside the club Heaven under the Charing Cross arches in 1983 and moved in with him shortly after. “How long have you been gay?” Severs asked Pettet that night. “About five minutes, since I got in this taxi,” Pettet replied.
Just as Severs set up the rooms and furniture in his house to illustrate the tale of the Jervis family, in our performance we are able to reveal their use in the actual domestic drama that took place here – the kitchen chairs where Severs and Pettet sat to eat, the four poster bed in the 18th-century bedroom where they slept together, and the “Poor Room” under the eaves, set up to evoke the lives of 19th-century paupers, where Pettet kept his things and where they remain to this day. In Simon’s Story, the role of Handscombe is performed by an actor leading an audience of eight through these rooms, recounting the love story and revisiting the events of that time.
It was a contradictory and conflicted relationship. Severs was Pettet’s first love. He also inducted Pettet into London’s hedonistic gay scene and Pettet embraced it enthusiastically, even if he would have preferred a monogamous partnership with Severs.
When Severs created his house to tell a story, he never expected to become part of that story himself. Yet this is precisely what has happened because the rooms take on an intimate, deeper meaning when you understand the real drama that was played out there. Severs is described by Handscombe as “the most promiscuous man in London”, yet he came to realise that his relationship with Pettet was the most significant of his life. Pettet was a talented ceramicist and, over the 10 years he was involved with Severs, he made all the delftware – fireplaces, tiles, dishes and tulipieres – that enliven the house today.
In 1984 Pettet and Severs were both diagnosed HIV+, making them two of the earliest cases in Britain. Pettet died at the age of just 28 in 1993 and Severs at 51 in 1999. Today, their story is as much a part of the meaning of the house as the fictional tales that Severs told.