Sam Bompas / photo by Ben Ottewell

Bompas & Parr is a creative studio specialising in realising the remarkable with a particular expertise in food. We work with the likes of Disney, Meta, Diageo, Unilever, the Crown Estate, the Met, V&A, the Barbican, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, with projects all over the world. Strangely this all started with making architectural jelly 17 years ago. But there’s a lot you can learn from a wobble.

Personally, it was when I went to Medieval Times (medieval-themed family dinner theatre experience held in replica castles) and ate chicken with knights colliding in front of me. My business partner Harry Parr pinpoints his memorable food experience to having foot long fish fingers at the Happy Eater.

We design experiences proactively so we’ve probably started the R&D on any experience years before a brief comes in.

In 2022, we produced a pop up restaurant experience called Forces of Nature, where guests seated in an ancient canyon in Saudi Arabia were served food cooked with lava at 1,350°C from a local volcano. We had done the due diligence for that project much earlier, when we flew out to meet Professor Bob Wysocki of Syracuse University to experiment with the culinary implications of cooking on red hot molten lava.

Alcoholic Architecture saw us create a bar which featured a breathable cloud of gin and tonic that intoxicated (safely) through the lungs and eyeballs. We enjoyed working with toxicologists and the council to mount something that was a world first, and that kept everyone safe while having a riot of a night out.

This is the sort of project we revel in. Even the first stages of work have fundamentally impacted our approach to theatre. There is so much to learn from Shakespeare and his company’s approach to staging shows and balancing the creative and the commercial to deliver the sublime.

Shakespeare means many things to different people. On the first day we’ll have people who’ve spent a lifetime studying Shakespeare walking through the door at the same time as people who know almost nothing about him and are just looking for a day out in London. If we get the right tone, volume of information and impactful experiential environment they’ll have a good time and leave having learnt something from one another.

Right now we’re interested in the creative possibilities of hybridising archaic museum-making approaches as in London’s Pitt Rivers Museum with the commentary of the Museum of  Jurassic Technology in LA, and the full panoply of contemporary techniques and technologies of multimedia entertainment studio Moment Factory. All with a view to creating fresh typologies of experience that grip people.

There’s a cosmos of mentors and industry leaders who I admire. Many have been terrifically generous with their knowledge. These include Paul Carty, interim chair of Failte Ireland, Ireland’s Tourism authority, who we worked with on the Guinness Storehouse. Other mentors include Eddie Kemsley of Dreamland in Margate, New York’s Museum of Sex founder Dan Gluck, and the founder of Secret Cinema Fabien Riggal.

Some of our heroes are swashbucklers and show-people of yore: spy and entertainer Josephine Baker and showman and politician PT Barnum who said, “Every crowd has a silver lining.”

In London it’s finding the right spaces. We are currently in the midst of the hurley burley of helping landlords re-imagine how their portfolios can be used for joy. We have high hopes for future opportunities.

Our vision lies in designing food strategy for countries and cities, using creativity to drive systemic change. We want to operate attractions dedicated to the fundamentals of human existence – Shakespeare, food, sex, death, religion. Also fireworks.

After coming to one of our shows, a six-year-old boy said it was the second best day of his life. If we can do this for more people, it’ll be glorious.