Opening March 2026 at The Lost Estate’s West London home, Chat Noir! is the latest creation from The Lost Estate, the company behind The Great Christmas Feast and 58th Street; celebrated for transforming live performance into fully realised worlds.
Here, audiences will be transported to bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s, inside the legendary Le Chat Noir – the original Parisian cabaret club that launched a cultural revolution and gave birth to the modern nightlife we still chase today.
It begins, as all good nights in Paris do, with a secret door.
Step through it and find yourself in the heart of Montmartre in 1896 – a world of smoke, song and rebellion. The clink of glasses, the scent of absinthe, the pulse of music rising through the night.
Welcome to Chat Noir!, where The Lost Estate invites audiences to travel back to the birthplace of cabaret for an evening of art, absinthe and anarchy.
At the centre of the story stands Rodolphe Salis – the real-life proprietor of Le Chat Noir and architect of its most notorious cabarets – as he prepares his final, and most ambitious, creation: a feverish celebration of love and madness. Played by the ‘Dandy King of Cabaret’, Joe Morrose, Salis is a man aflame with ideas, careering between anarchy and art, chasing one last moment of transcendence before the curtain falls.
Tonight he has summoned the greatest artists of his age — the magician Buatier De Kolta (performed by acclaimed magician Neil Kelso), dancer Cléo de Mérode, mime Paul LeGrand (performed by the virtuosic Pi the Mime), and chanteuse Yvette Guilbert — to create one final, audacious revue, a night of love, madness, and French art from across the ages. Together they conjure a variety show of reckless brilliance, accompanied by the club’s house band, Les Enfants Vagabondes.
A wild troupe of bohemian musicians, led by the young Erik Satie, take their place at the heart of Chat Noir!. One of the most eccentric and influential figures of the Parisian avant-garde, audiences join Satie at the height of his career as the real-life resident pianist of the original Le Chat Noir – a composer whose music would go on to define a generation of French modernism. Known as Les Enfants Vagabondes, the ensemble perform new arrangements of French late-Romantic masterpieces by The Lost Estate’s composer-in-residence, Steffan Rees. Their ragtag quintet – piano, violin, cello, accordion and percussion – reimagines Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Bizet’s Carmen, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Saint-Saëns’s Danse Macabre for a night that blurs the line between elegance and delirium.
As the evening unfolds, their performances spill from stage to floor, musicians roaming between tables while a spellbinding sequence of shadow puppetry transforms light and smoke into living art. It is a world where sound, movement and illusion entwine, and where cabaret first sparked into a global phenomenon.
As night falls, guests slip into a world of after-dark delights. Inside, they become part of the story as they join the writers, illustrators, poets and musicians who made Montmartre hum – the artists, revolutionaries and mad romantics who lived by night and dined between poems, paintings and half-finished manifestos. The experience evokes the secret suppers of Paris’s wayward aristocrats, where indulgence is an art form and pleasure a quiet rebellion.
Guests dine as they did – not with aristocratic formality but with appetite and abandon. The tables are laden with the classic haute cuisine dishes that gave birth to modern gastronomy: Coq au Vin, Crème Brûlée, champagne, absinthe, Parisian cocktails and an extensive old-world wine list. The Lost Estate Executive Chef Ashley Clarke and Head of Beverages Ilya Demenkov have created a feast of butter, brilliance and bohemia, served beneath flickering lamplight.
This is time travel by velvet and smoke – a living, breathing story where music, theatre, design and hospitality become a single work of art. This extraordinary immersive world is created by The Lost Estate’s Head of Design Thomas Kirk Shannon, lighting designer Mike Gunning (Alice’s Adventures Underground, Drowned Man, Grace Jones) and couture by Susan Kulkarni (Secret Cinema, Come Alive!). The Lost Estate are fast becoming the leaders in immersive live arts experiences, crafting worlds that blur the lines between stage and reality and offer Londoners something rare: a night that feels like it could change history – a night out, a century in the making.
The world of Chat Noir! is designed for surrender. Guests dress in Vintage Parisian style – silks, velvets, waistcoats and smoky eyes – and cross a threshold where phones are forbidden and time loses its grip. Somewhere between dinner and dream, the city outside disappears and the cabaret begins.
Speaking about the experience, William Kunhardt, co-founder of The Lost Estate, said: “Every experience by The Lost Estate begins the same way – an obsession with a moment in time when art, hospitality, and visionary people collided to create an inflection point in culture.
“Chat Noir! is the expression of our latest obsession: the bohemian subculture of 1890s Paris, the dawning of French Haute Cuisine, and amidst it all the impresario Rodolphe Salis with his masterpiece, Le Chat Noir. It was the world’s first cabaret – a night-club where great French artists gathered to share and experiment, where every layer of Parisian society came to be entertained, provoked, and liberated. Dining, drinking, and artistic freedom became one. A movement was born that would change global culture forever. What a moment to bring back to life – to give people the chance to travel back in time and step inside this extraordinary nocturnal world, indulge utterly and live out one of the most explosive, daring and hedonistic moments in European cultural history.”
Chat Noir! opens in West Kensington, London on March 24, 2026. Tickets are available here.
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