Talk to a member of staff at the auditorium entrance if you have a disability that means you can’t queue, or you need extra time to take your seat. Watch Bjarte Eike and Barokksolistene perform ‘The Alehouse Sessions’ from the Czech Musica Pura Festival in 2019.

That balances of bawdiness and reflections are the group's forte was obvious during their first stateside performance on 11 October 2017 at New York City's SubCulture. Speaking on the project, Bjarte Eike said: “The signature of this project is the interaction on stage between the players and the audience. Cut scene, and we move into the “back room” of the pub (which is really a stage at the Battersea Arts Centre), we’re on stage in front of a very enthusiastic, diverse audience who’s joining in singing, laughing and dancing. Indeed, Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike's fascinating project doesn't so much transport us back to the past as reposition the past in the here and now, when its lessons are more poignant than ever.

The Alehouse Sessions aims to capture the atmosphere and sounds of London at a time where the theatres were closed, due to Oliver Cromwell’s prohibition in the 17th century.

Commissioned by the BBC and directed by award-winning director Dominic Best (AdLib Productions), the film will be premiered on BBC TV in late April 2023. Inevitably some of that concert atmosphere, the back and-forth repartee, is gone, but instead those interactions and conversations are dissolved into the music itself. In fact, we are recreating the anarchic spirit of Oliver Cromwell’s lockdown London when the theatres and playhouses were shut down by the Puritans and the musicians surreptitiously crept into the backrooms of alehouses and inns in protest. It gives audiences a window into this tumultuous period through Purcell overtures, English sea shanties, and Scandinavian folk songs thrown in for good measure. Venue-provided beer in hand, they shared a toast with the audience before diving into a flow so evocative that “atmospheric” barely does justice to describing its escapist power.It’s packed full of exercises for students, plus examples from the standard repertoire to show you how to integrate the technique into your playing. Eike was a beacon of focus throughout, linking his ensemble into a chain of artful exchanges, comic interludes, and audience rapport. Eike is a charismatic artist with a talent for conceiving imaginative live and recording projects … Innately theatrical, genre bending and suffused with great musicianship and string playing, this is a substantial and fine piece of work. If it has to be put in a historical context, the project draws its inspiration from the Shakespearian theatre where there was a direct communication between stage and hall- going in-between the story that was being told and occurring events happening in the hall. Although Charles II would lift the ban, by then tavern music had grown into something of a genre, in which the vagaries of quotidian life rubbed elbows with mythologies in the making.