Immersive theatre giants Punchdrunk: ‘We want audiences to feel a sense of danger’
I’m feeling my way down a dark alleyway just wide enough to fit through. An expansive theatre set towers metres above me. Three u-turns later I’ve lost my bearings as we stop in front of a harness, rocking gently in the air. “One audience member will get taken here and come face-to-face with a God,” reveals Felix Barrett, founder of Punchdrunk..
I’m one of the first to experience The Burnt City, the first show in eight years from the most influential immersive theatre company in the world. Set up by Barrett in the early noughties, Punchdrunk’s return is hotly anticipated.
“I try to make spaces more claustrophobic,” says Barrett of the punishingly petite alleyway we’re traversing. “If Felix had his way he’d have us all crawling on our hands and knees,” adds choreographer and co-director Maxine Doyle, only half joking. “I want it to be utterly experiential,” responds Barrett, who is co-directing. It’s surreal hearing the word ‘experiential’, now a buzz word exploited by marketing firms, spoken by the man largely responsible for its initial rise.
The Burnt City takes place in Punchdrunk’s first permanent home, a couple of industrial units in Woolwich, one of which was the former Woolwich Arsenal and another an old museum of military history. One representing Troy and the other Ancient Greece, they’re as sprawling as you’d imagine.
Barrett and Doyle tour me through painstakingly designed spaces, some recreating cityscapes, others naturalistic hellscapes, for nearly an hour. They assure me we only scratch the surface. “This is the outer reaches of Greece, the wilderness, the land of the Gods,” says Barrett, gesturing towards a museum-sized space with thousands of tonnes of grey sand below foot and faux crumbling Grecian murals on the walls. A team of 300 have worked on pre-production which began in September 2021.
Barrett and Doyle seem endearingly nervous when I ask whether they feel pressure about the big return. “You do feel a responsibility to audiences,” admits Doyle. I ask whether this is the biggest immersive theatre experience ever staged. “I think that’s probably true,” says Barrett.
With something this cumbersome, with ambition spanning over a decade, where do they start? “We listen to the rhythm of the building and understand the key sources, which are Agamemnon and Hecuba, our Greek plays,” says Barrett. “You break out different environments and put them through the filter of our collision text, which is dystopic sci-fi, then you start to build a living, breathing city with those environments in mind.”
It all sounds so easy. “Our design team could be doing movies but they’re doing this with us,” points out Barrett.
We land upon a hidden-away courtyard with a flavour of Bangkok, inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. We pass a sake bar, then a dressing room “for performers who work in a nightclub – all within the world,” says Barrett. “Inhabitants of the underworld, where 49 women who are sisters who murdered their husbands on their wedding night. It’s all in the Greek myths.”
Barrett is particularly pleased with a colourful shelf of 49 pairs of knackered old flip-flops. “This is a cupboard for naughty performers,” he tells me, passing another doorway and then a creepy-looking bed hidden under a low ceiling, big enough for ticket holders to snuggle on. There are also 24 hidden rooms accessible only to guests with a performer. “You might be able to rent a room though at some point,” teases Doyle. For this run? “Maybe, who knows.”
We pass a frayed power cable. “Health and safety is front and centre but we want our audience to feel that sense of danger,” adds Barrett. (It’s a prop, don’t worry.)
It’s this level of detail that elevates Punchdrunk above their competitors. Both Doyle and Barrett are resoundingly positive about the rise of immersive theatre, but Doyle has been “disappointed” by the last few immersive things she’s seen. “We work so hard, we’re inspired by craft and really good content, so I think often immersive theatre falls short on content, some of the experiences I’ve had,” she says.
Gatsby-themed immersive events have become ten-a-penny in a world where immersion has been commodified. “That’s the difference with Gatsby and Secret Cinema shows, for us we build a show with performers that could exist on stage at the National [Theatre], we just choose to put it in a building,” Barrett says. “Actually, we’re really really rigorous that it has to stand up to scrutiny.”
As my tour ends, we arrive at a posh uptown piazza the size of an actual town square. “It’s a premonition the city’s about to fall,” says Barrett of the loud operatic music which blares. It’s our cue to leave, so we duck out of a discreet door and end up in the Punchdrunk office – a sobering bolt back to reality a few metres away. “The whole space is full of secrets,” confesses Barrett with a wry smile.
The Burnt City by Punchdrunk is booking until December 4 2022