I’m a West End star – audiences put their feet on the seats and talk on the phone

It will come as a surprise to no one that musical theatre was not on the list of professions Hannah Lowther was given by her careers adviser at school. “I had no idea what this job entailed,” she says. “It was always hard to find information about it, or hear from people actually doing it. It remains a mystery to a lot of people.” Lowther, 29, has spent much of the past five years trying to change that. A West End actress now touring in Legally Blonde, playing Margot and alternate Elle Woods to Amber Davies, she has also built an audience of more than 1.6 million across her social platforms. Her podcast, How Very Hannah, is now in its fourth series, with guests from Carrie Hope Fletcher to Bonnie Langford. Shorts “To have a platform that brings the information to people who want it is really important to me,” she says. “A lot of the time this industry is depicted as all glitz and glamour, and I’m setting out to break that down.” Take money. Lowther has shared openly about how pay works for performers. “I got a bit of stick for posting that,” she says. “Weirdly, I thought it would be from producers, but it was actually from other musical theatre performers. I think we’ve maybe been conditioned not to talk about it. But if we don’t, it gives the powers at the top the chance to take the mick. “I’ve always been very open with friends and family about money. People assume that because movie stars make big bucks, theatre must be the same, and it’s far from that.” The reality is precarious: performers are freelancers and work can vanish quickly. If they get paid at all. “Talking about this has unlocked a memory that I did a job at the start of 2023 and I’m still owed pay from it,” she says. Hannah Lowther made her West End debut at the tender age of 10 years old That impulse to show what theatre life is actually like might drive How Very Hannah, but the podcast also gives Lowther something else: control. “I love being in a rehearsal room and being told where to go and what to do. That’s my comfort zone. But the podcast is somewhere I get to be the boss. I’ve spent my life following a script, so it’s nice to be able to own the narrative.” Lowther grew up in Basingstoke in a far-from-stagey family – her mother works for the NHS and her father is a site manager at a school – but with a clear passion for the arts. From a young age, she took dance classes and appeared in local amateur productions, and her parents soon realised this might be more than a hobby. “There were all sorts of theatre mum forums, and my mum joined one called notapushymum.com, which I think is so funny because it was literally for pushy mums,” she laughs. “Someone should have made a documentary about that forum.” Through the site her mother found an audition for The Sound of Music at the London Palladium. Lowther won the role of Brigitta von Trapp and made her West End debut aged 10. “At that point the blinkers came on. I was like: obviously this is what I’m going to do with my life.” At 16 Lowther left school to train at Italia Conti, before specialising in musical theatre at the London School of Musical Theatre, graduating in 2019. “Sometimes people push this narrative that drama school is bitchy or competitive, but I didn’t have that experience,” she recalls. “We were really supportive of each other, and I think that shaped me professionally. Even if you are competing against friends for a role, there doesn’t have to be animosity. You can still be happy for each other.” By early 2020, she was auditioning and getting callbacks. Then Covid shut theatres. Instead of starting the stage career she had trained for, she found herself working at Tesco. “Then my life changed in a completely different way to what I expected,” she says. Missing musical theatre, Lowther began making short videos of herself singing and dancing in the aisles and sharing them on TikTok. When she went viral, what began as a way of keeping herself entertained became an unexpected second career. By the time theatres reopened, not only did she have an enormous social media following, but her performing career gathered pace too. She landed her first West End role in Heathers in 2021; roles in The SpongeBob Musical and Six followed. While she freely admits how much fun the job is, it isn’t without its hard work. Lowther remembers working on Heathers for seven months, six days a week, without taking a single sick day or holiday. “I didn’t recognise it at the time, but the burnout was crazy,” she says. “It took me a couple of months to recover. That was a massive learning curve: as much as you want to keep pushing, sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself is take a break.” There are other challenges, too. Audience behaviour, she thinks, has worsened. “Someone’s phone going off, someone filming the show when they’re not meant to, people chatting or putting their feet up on the seats – that is pretty standard now,” she says. “Some people really have a lot of nerve in the theatre. I think they forget that they’re not in their living rooms. “If you’re having a full-blown conversation, the people on stage can probably hear you. The people around you who have paid for tickets definitely can. It’s a struggle sometimes.” ‘Sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself is take a break’ There is a more existential anxiety hanging over the industry, too, with news of productions cutting their runs short seems to arrive with troubling regularity. “It does put you slightly on edge,” she admits. “One week you might be sold out and the next venue might not be so busy. You never know when there are going to be budget cuts. It can feel unnerving.” Which brings us back to money. How financially secure does she feel? “Having my social media platform is really good financial security for me – and I say security loosely, because the online world isn’t super-secure either,” she says. “Some months you might make good money and some months not. But it’s a comfort blanket to know that if I’m out of work, I can hopefully keep making content and the podcast and still have an income.” Yet, that online success has also prompted suspicion from some performers. “People sometimes look at it like I’ve skipped something, or found my way into the industry because of social media, when clearly that isn’t the case,” she says. “I’ve worked really, really hard. But there are so many routes into theatre now, I don’t think it matters. The work you do on stage and your work ethic are what’s important.” That is one reason she has relished Legally Blonde. “Having so many people come and watch the show and see, ‘Oh, she can actually do it,’ has been really nice,” she says. “Especially when it’s other musical theatre performers or friends within the industry. I guess I still want to prove myself.” How Very Hannah is available on all major podcast providers