2025 marks the beginning of a new and exciting year for Maltese theatre productions… and it only took a couple of hours for it to start with a bang – and a chop!

During the official New Year’s Eve premiere of 1881, a new immersive theatrical experience where the audience members walk around a house, following different characters and choosing their own adventure, one of the actors ended up cutting her hair in front of the stunned audience.

The immersive show, which plays more like a real-life video game, is dark and gritty in nature, and while not giving much away, the short clip shows just intense it can get.

Sandie von Brockdorff, who is one of only five full-time national theatre actors and plays the part of an alternate-universe, radically religious “warrior-nun”, is one of the small cast of characters who are faced with the end of the world. And while all the characters have different different ways of dealing with the apocalypse, Sandie’s character ended up chopping her hair off in one of her pivotal scenes.

“It was something that was actually on my bucket list, and when [1881 co-creator] Sean Buhagiar asked me, in a very cautious way, half-jokingly, and in a ‘just asking’ sort of way, I ended up going for it,” von Brockdorff told Lovin Malta.

“As an artist, you have to commit to give your art the weight you think it deserve,” the actress said when asked about why she ended up going for such a permanent act on the show’s first night. “I thought OK, let’s go all in then!”