Punchdrunk’s last immersive production, The Burnt City, drew more than 600 masked theatregoers each night to spend three hours venturing around a sprawling saga based on Greek myths. Their next show, announced on Monday, will invite them to take off their shoes and socks for a slumber party.
“This whole thing is a bedtime story,” said the company’s founder, Felix Barrett, of Viola’s Room, which will open in May at their headquarters in Woolwich, south-east London. Audiences will wear headphones rather than masks and follow what Barrett called an audio-driven “linear story” rather than explore the “open world” of Punchdrunk’s trademark shows, which let you roam freely around the space. Theatregoers will, according to publicity material, “feel their way through a maze-like installation as an unseen narrator guides them on a sensory journey”.
The one-hour show is set to be an intimate affair, designed for a maximum of six people at a time. You can choose to experience it on your own if you wish or, suggested Barrett, as a couple because it could be “the ultimate date show”. Either way, the director said the experience will be “laced with fear and a lot of fun”.
Viola’s Room has its origins in one of the company’s first projects, 24 years ago, which was an adaptation of a gothic mystery story by Barry Pain called The Moon-Slave. Only four performances took place, each for a solo audience member, as the company was unable to afford further stagings. Those four theatregoers were driven into the countryside where “the natural landscape was the main canvas for the piece – it was all about being out of your comfort zone”. That show ended with a marine flare being set off: “It turned the whole world red,” Barrett told Esquire magazine in 2020. “And there was a huge soaring crescendo in the music, and it illuminated 200 scarecrows all staring at that one audience member.”
The company have collaborated with Booker prize-shortlisted writer Daisy Johnson (Everything Under) on the new project. Johnson, who said her script will be “lush and bodily”, had not read Pain’s work before Barrett passed it to her. The Moon-Slave is “a strange story, a kind of fairytale”, she said. “You’re never quite sure what is real and not real.”
Pain’s opening line conjures a physicality and atmosphere familiar from many Punchdrunk shows: “The Princess Viola had, even in her childhood, an inevitable submission to the dance; a rhythmical madness in her blood answered hotly to the dance music, swaying her, as the wind sways trees, to movements of perfect sympathy and grace.”
It is Johnson’s first time writing for the theatre and she is also adapting John Bowen’s cult TV play Robin Redbreast for a new immersive show co-created by Maxine Peake, Sarah Frankcom and Imogen Knight in Manchester this May.
Barrett said Punchdrunk’s mission remains the same since it was founded in 2000: to plunge audiences into worlds that create “awe and wonder” and merge “the intellectual and the visceral”. On Viola’s Room they are collaborating with sound designer Gareth Fry, who Barrett called “a master in taking people on journeys through sound”. The production is conceived, directed and designed by Barrett, with co-direction by Hector Harkness, design by Casey Jay Andrews and lighting by Simon Wilkinson.
Barrett recognised how much the industry has changed since Punchdrunk’s creation and how much harder it is for emerging theatre-makers today. “It’s much tougher out there. The first shows we did, we had the buildings for free. We had the generosity of benefactors saying we could borrow the building. I was able to work in a coffee shop in the daytime, and a restaurant in the evening, and save enough money to do it. Now the sheer cost of making work is really prohibitive … The danger is that it’s increasingly becoming the world of the privileged.”
The same could be said for watching theatre at a time of ever more expensive tickets. Barrett stressed that Viola’s Room is “super intimate, for a maximum of six people, but we are going to make sure there are enough tickets to get lots of people through”. The cheapest preview performance tickets are £12.50; after opening night, they will be available from £28.50 upwards.
