Interactive theatre group Punchdrunk’s new show The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable

Punchdrunk’s new walk-through show takes punters on a tour of a disused film studio — be prepared for a leap in the dark, says Richard Godwin
Perou
28 June 2013

Ordinarily when you go to the theatre you don't have to do very much — just sit in a slightly uncomfortable chair for a couple of hours. The weightiest decisions you have to make concern interval gin, toilet timing and whether to tell the heavy breather on your right to shut it.

At the Drowned Man, the latest immersive performance from Punchdrunk, the pressure is on. The theatrical space is a four-storey warehouse in Paddington, encompassing a Hollywood film studio, various lovingly dressed rooms and... well, it would be a shame to spoil the surprises.

As soon as you pick up your carnival mask (which divides the performers from the audience) and enter the environment, you must make decisions. Stay with your friends? Walk into that caravan? Investigate that weird hooting noise? It’s a play where you actually get to play.

Immersive events have by now become an established part of London’s cultural landscape. Punchdrunk’s recent happenings in the capital have included Faust (soul-searching in a warehouse in Wapping), The Masque of the Red Death (Edgar Allen Poe in the bowels of the Battersea Arts Centre), and The Duchess of Malfi (a collaboration with English National Opera in old pharmaceutical premises in Docklands).

The Drowned Man is supposedly inspired by Georg Büchner’s anti-war fable, Woyzeck, and has a strong echo of David Lynch’s Los Angeles, but for better or worse it feels like nothing so much as a Punchdrunk show.

The Shunt company, in existence since 1998, was one of the first of the recent wave. “All it really amounts to is theatre of infantile shock and sensation,” said one critic of their 2004 show Tropicana, though for the crowds that flocked to their weird cabarets under London Bridge, infantile shock and sensation were precisely what they were after.

You could trace the movement further back to the long-defunct Alien War, a “total reality” experience inspired by the Ridley Scott film that occupied the basement of the Trocadero in the mid-Nineties, where yelping teenage boys ran away from pretend aliens in the company of an actor dressed as a space marine.

Secret Cinema, which launched in 2007, plays on a similar imaginative leap, with its actors and interactive environments based on whichever film is being screened: Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, The Third Man. The concept fulfils that childish wish to enter, say, the Technicolor world of Bugsy Malone, splurge gun in hand, and makes sitting down to watch the film at the end feel quaintly passive.

Still the most revolutionary is the Evening Standard Theatre Award-winning You Me Bum Bum Train, which grew out of student club nights in Brighton. Each audience member enters alone and progresses through the space to be confronted with a series of “experiences”, peopled by an unfathomable number of volunteers. In Stratford last summer, I had the chance to conduct a symphony orchestra, operate a digger, lead a drugs raid, host a radio show … it was more like a form of therapy than theatre. And the possibilities, I suspect, have yet to be completely explored. I dream of the simultaneous performance of Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in an abandoned castle, a fully interactive Death Star, a room in which we are hooked up to some sort of Matrix and exist in our fantastical projections — though I may be getting ahead of myself.

At a preview of The Drowned Man last week the rules of engagement seemed firmly established. Do not wear glasses if at all possible (the mask will squish them). Leave your bag in the cloakroom with your cameraphone inside it. (Even if you don’t take a photo of something, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.) Strike out alone. Do not imagine that wearing a mask makes you invisible and excuses you from the basic courtesy of not slamming doors in people’s faces. And, if you need orientation, find the bar at the centre, where you can take off your mask, have a beer, watch the excellent cabaret and complain that it’s not as good as your first time.

Here you can also identify the various species of Punchdrunkers. There are those who have boned up on Woyzeck and claim to have appreciated every nuance of the narrative. “What, you mean you didn’t get that the witchy lady was the naked guy’s second cousin? Like, duh!” These people are irritating. Then there are those who are dismayed that they missed the story. Truly, the modern malaise of FOMO (fear of missing out) strikes hard when you have the choice of following the naked guy or the witchy lady.

Actually, seeking a conventional narrative is a bit like going to a cricket match for the slam-dunks. Felix Barrett, the director of Punchdrunk, once told me that he hoped one day to create a real-life computer game — though, in a way, he already has. If you have ever peeled away in the middle of Grand Theft Auto to admire the sunset, you’ll get Punchdrunk. In any case, it makes sense that computer games, by far the dominant form of the age, should exert an influence on other forms in this way. The dominant artistic modes of the 21st century will surely mirror 21st-century dynamics. Just as everyone sees different Google results and a different Facebook page, so everyone will see a different play.

In contemporary art, some French theorists have come up with the terms “relational aesthetics” to describe such works as Carsten Höller’s helter-skelters in Tate Modern, or Antony Gormley’s white-mist room at the Hayward Gallery. It is art that places the viewer’s subjective experience at the centre. And if you still think Punchdrunk is short on narrative, just listen to the audience as they emerge. They’re not short of stories.

The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable is at Temple Studios, London Road, W2, until December 30. Tickets and information: punchdrunk.com and nationaltheatre.org.uk

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