Punchdrunk, the company that has for 20 years enthralled theatregoers by exploding traditional dramatic form and setting performers and audiences loose into the same vast, detailed, labyrinthine spaces, is taking on what might be the biggest, most fundamental story of them all – and one, alas, with terrible resonance in this particular moment. It is the siege of Troy: the subject of Homer’s Iliad, the focus of many Greek tragedies and, in many ways, the literary war that has, over millennia, served as a proxy for thinking about other, more recent conflicts.
The Burnt City will be the company’s first show on a large scale in the UK since 2013, when it turned an old sorting office near Paddington station in London into a flyblown old Hollywood for The Drowned Man, a version of Büchner’s Woyzeck. The company has, after two decades of finding different spaces in which to make work, acquired a permanent building of its own in Woolwich. “After being nomadic for all this time, we just missed London,” says Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s artistic director. The cavernous space, once part of the Royal Arsenal, is at 100,000 sq ft big enough for even this company’s wild ambition.
