The Burnt City opens in Woolwich this week
(Picture: Julian Abrams)I’m trudging across a desert of glittering black sand. Suddenly, I glimpse a row of crumbling houses through the dim light. I duck into a back alley hung with chaotic strings of washing and peer into a sculptor’s studio full of dinky little horses made from clay. Then, I follow the pulse of music into a nightclub that’s full of people dancing as though they’re possessed by a particularly artistically minded demon. This might all sound like the kind of dream that follows too much brie at bedtime, but actually I’m getting a sneak peek at the rich, gorgeous world of immersive theatre masters Punchdrunk’s new show The Burnt City.
For their hotly anticipated comeback after eight years away from London, they’ve crafted a whole universe behind a hidden door in Woolwich. And it’s unfolding on a scale as epic as the ancient Greek myths that have inspired it.
But what’s the best way to encounter this vast show without getting a serious case of FOMO? “You need to know that you won’t be able to see it all,” says Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett. “There is 100,000 square feet to explore. So you have to listen to your instincts. You can follow a character around and see their story unfold in real time. Or you can explore the building like an adult adventure playground. Or you can just retire to the bar and watch the show within the show. They’re all the right answer.”
His longtime collaborator choreographer Maxine Doyle adds that it’s also important “not to overthink it - do your thinking afterwards. It’s about being present, and investing time, which is sometimes difficult within the world we live in. Be patient, and you’ll find that soon enough, things will arrive around you that are exciting.”
For some fortunate attendees, that could include Punchdrunk’s famous one-on-ones: sought after moments between a single audience member and performer. But in the eight years since Punchdrunk’s last major London show, debates have sprung up about consent and safety in immersive theatre, and a 2018 Buzzfeed investigation found instances of performers being sexually harrassed at Punchdrunk’s longrunning New York show Sleep No More. Where’s the line between providing an intimate and surprising experience, and crossing boundaries for audience members or performers? “Safeguarding has been a really important part of this”, says Barrett. “The performers are really skilled at detecting resistance,” adds Doyle. “It’s a dialogue, and most audiences respond really, really well. And for audiences who find it a bit overwhelming, or don’t understand the rules, there are procedures to remove them from the scene or situation.”
A lot has changed since my first encounter with Punchdrunk, 2007’s spellbinding The Masque of the Red Death. Then, immersive theatre was in its infancy, and I was bewildered and rapt to find myself ducking through a fireplace to find myself in a corridor whose walls were lined with pinned butterflies, spying on a cabaret performer deck themselves in finery in their dressing room before they took to the stage, or watching a woman erupt messily from the grave.
But in the two decades since Punchdrunk was founded, the word ‘immersive’ has gone from a niche term to a universal adjective that’s chucked onto any number of events: from drag brunches to marketing stunts to theatre shows that have a bar on stage. So it’s both ironic and unsurprising that Punchdrunk, arguably the world’s leading makers of immersive theatre, are keen to divorce themselves from the term. “We never use it about ourselves,” says Barrett. “We’ve always said we’re site-sympathetic.”
“I think it probably is overused,” continues Barrett, “Life is immersive! It’s used for anything where you’re not sat down, and sometimes these things are quite cheap and gimmicky - it’s so prevalent which I think has diluted its impact.”
The task Punchdrunk has ahead is winning over a new generation of uninitiated theatregoers to their unique way of doing things. As Barrett says, “Eight years has passed in the blink of an eye for us, but for some people it’s been the incredibly formative years between 18 and 26, say. There’s this whole new audience who have never heard of us, which means they really won’t understand what’s behind the door.”
It’s hard to sum up what makes a Punchdrunk show so special, but words like ‘wonder’ and ‘adventure’ spring to my mind when I try to describe shows like 2013’s The Drowned Man, a 60s Hollywood-inspired fantasia which was full of stunning images, including an artfully recreated field of wheat where a woman danced in a pool of red light.
And a lot of the company’s success comes from the way it uses carefully choreographed movement to bring its worlds to life. As Barrett ruefully explains, “the first Punchdrunk shows weren’t really working, because you’d explore this amazing building, and then the dialogue would start and it would just be text, which was really anti-climactic.”
So dance was the magic ingredient that Punchdrunk needed. As Doyle says, “There’s always been a huge site-specific movement in the dance world, stretching back to the ‘happenings’ of the 60s. I was dissatisfied with the atmosphere in venues: you put in all this work and then it feels so dead before and after.”
When Barrett explained his plans for Sleep No More, a 2003 Hitchcockian take on Macbeth that unfolded in a deserted old school building, Doyle was immediately on board. And now, of course, Sleep No More has a strong claim to being the world’s most successful immersive show: it was reimagined for a permanent home in New York since 2011, and in Shanghai since 2016.
But why has it taken so long for Punchdrunk to come back to London? According to Barrett, it’s been too hard to find a London space to match the company’s ambition. “There’s a whole piece to be written on site-based work and the shows that never happen, because it’s quite rare to get one to land”, says Barrett.
Punchdrunk artistic director Felix Barrett’s relationship with their new Woolwich HQ began a whopping 20 years ago, when the company was in its infancy. “We came here and took one look at the scale of this building - we had a budget of about 200 quid - and thought arrrrrghhh [he screams theatrically] it’s incredible, but we can’t do that.”
It’s only now that they’ve been able to make these buildings their own. “We’re London born and bred, so we knew we wanted to put down roots and have a home,” says Barrett. Woolwich houses both Punchdrunk’s offices and the giant world of The Burnt City. Inspired by the story of the Trojan war, the company’s substantial design team have created both the bleak barracks of the Spartans, and the narrow alleyways and decadent nightclubs of Troy.
As Barrett explains, the aesthetic is deliberately eclectic. “We always use classic texts, because it gives the audience an anchor point into the world,” he says. “But we also became really excited by dystopias.” That means Ancient Greece collides with sources like the 1927 sci-fi film Metropolis: “creatures, gods, monsters, mortals, it all sort of seems to fit in the same landscape,” says Barrett.
For now, an army worthy of Sparta of technicians and crew members is transforming the space into a new world. “We’re in marathon mode”, explains Doyle. “And we will give our heart and soul to this show.” It’s a sacrifice of sweat and toil that’s ready to win a new generation of fans to Punchdrunk.
