Seventeen years ago, Punchdrunk began to change the way I felt. I remember my first encounter with the company in a misty factory near the Oval. And my transforming moment coming out of Faust in a five-storey Docklands warehouse a year later: the experience was so all-encompassing I had to shake myself into everyday life and architecture, eyes shrinking and expanding.
Felix Barrett, the artistic director, and the choreographer Maxine Doyle have also altered the theatre – in entirely unexpected ways. They don’t produce new words; their shows are mostly silent. They don’t directly suggest social or political change, or offer a new version of character. Yet their shows – in which the audience mingle with the action, spectators deciding what they see – involve an intense refocusing, a hesitation between being lost and taking control. Barrett and his co-director Doyle do not describe what they do as “immersive theatre”. Rightly: the term suggests a tour around an ancient kitchen where someone dressed up in a pinny and mobcap says hello to you over a saucepan. Punchdrunk alter the very texture of things: they provide microscopic, drilling detail, but at the same time they swivel an audience’s sense of space.
