You know the kind of madcap theatrical territory that you’re about to traverse when the warning to a show reads like this: “Audiences are advised to wear sensible shoes and that this show is really not suitable for people of a nervous disposition.”
But then, this is Punchdrunk’s latest experiment, designed to leave you reeling. Good shoes are required because, as with all their shows, It Felt Like a Kiss is made to be walked, rather than sat, through, and also, if the need arises, to run. On this occasion, it’s very likely, too. Because theatre’s most mysterious mavericks have teamed up with the master of TV documentary, Adam Curtis, to create a genre-defying, immersive show deep in a derelict office block in the middle of Manchester.
The show boasts a score from Damon Albarn, who is still “not entirely sure what to expect. It’s an unusual project, ” he says, but then, “we’re all slightly unusual people.”
Albarn is not the only one in the dark. “It’s a kind of ghost train experience,” says 31-year-old Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s founder and artistic director, “what the Americans call a ‘dark ride’.” Audiences will walk through a rabbit warren of meticulously realised scenes from 1960s America, mirrored in Curtis’s film, his trademark waterfall of hypnotically edited archive footage, which appears on screens throughout. “It does get frightening, the farther in you go,” Barrett says. “There are performers inside whose only intention is to shock you. In a ghost train, if you can’t cope, you wait and the train pulls you through. Here, you’ll have to run. We hope audiences do run. And scream.” (It is hard to convey, when reporting sentences like those, just how gentle and genial is the bearded, long-haired man who utters them.) Punchdrunk are fabled for propelling audiences through the strangest of looking glasses into perfectly formed parallel universes. The company take over derelict urban spaces and transform the interiors; audiences don masks and create their own narratives, rifling through characters’ diaries, chasing performers down dusty corridors in search of storylines. Most famously, with Faust in 2006, Goethe’s haunting masterpiece was refracted and replayed in 1950s America, in a vast, disused warehouse in Wapping, East London. The Masque of the Red Death, the following year, turned the Battersea Arts Centre into a labyrinthine Gothic playground in which the tales of Edgar Allan Poe ran gloriously amok for seven sell-out months.
But unlike every other show in the company’s nine-year history, there is a set, straight path through this dreamscape, which has taken 50 design volunteers seven weeks to construct, and which you experience, unmasked, in groups of nine. “What propels you through the space is light,” Curtis adds in his machinegun patter. “Ultimately, this is about the rise of individualism. It’s about you. Fragments, thrown at you, that you piece together into a story. It’s like life,” he concludes. Except, having walked through a small section of the set with Curtis and Barrett, I can confirm that, on almost every level, it isn’t. Rarely do I wade through a blinding sea of helium balloons to get to bed.
But even saying this may be too much, Barrett frowns, as we sit blinking in the midday Manchester sun. “This is really weird for us,” he says. “The key ethos of Punchdrunk is that we’re this strange, tiny, curious secret you have to hunt out. We’re so, so happy for the success, of course, but it’s getting harder to keep things hidden.” He squints up at a 20ft poster advertising the show and admirably demonstrating his point. “For years we were this tiny, tiny company, struggling to get every show on.”
Today, according to Tom Morris, with whom Barrett co-directed Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour earlier in the year, they are “refreshing theatre in much the same way that Simon McBurney and Complicite did in the Eighties”. Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National, who co-produced Faust, agrees: “The first thing of theirs I saw blew me away. The completeness of the vision is astonishing. Felix is a remarkable director, a genuine creative force and Punchdrunk have had a palpable, galvanising effect.”
On paper, it isn’t easy to see why. Nothing Punchdrunk do is new. Neil Bartlett was staging shows in asylums in the Seventies, Bobby Baker employed her own kitchen; companies such as IOU and Forkbeard Fantasy have been transforming abattoirs and old banks for three decades. Deborah Warner mounted epic, breathtaking one-on-one performances in the Nineties across derelict London landmarks, and companies such as Shunt and Grid Iron have since pushed the form to new heights.
So why is it Punchdrunk that James Purnell, the Culture Secretary, cited as evidence of how exciting British theatre looks? Why Punchdrunk that Kevin Spacey approached to collaborate on an underground theatrical art project earlier in the year, Tunnel 228? And how is it that all 15,000 tickets to that event had gone, hours after it was disclosed in The London Paper?
“They are extremely good,” says Warner, “But what’s genuinely exciting is that they have discovered how to let large numbers of people in without ruining the sense of intimacy.” Too large an audience and suddenly a theatre seems a very good idea, with its good acoustics and faultless sightlines. Odd venues, though, are better for generating word-of-mouth hits.
As with so much else, the solution to this dilemma happened almost by accident. Barrett began making elaborate dens in his South London bedroom as a boy. “Much to Mum’s horror. Our attic was full of clutter,” he recalls, “which incidentally has since been in all our shows. I took everything out, built a structure in the middle and put all the crap back in so that it looked exactly the same. But if you opened a hatch, inside was this hidden world. My formative years disappeared like that.”
He wanted to study film, but his drama teacher at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich convinced him to do a drama degree first. Then in 1995 Barrett saw H.G., by the avant-garde artist Robert Wilson, which took visitors through a series of time tableaus in the Clink Street Vaults. “I’d found my calling,” he says. “I saw then that it was possible.”
In the final year of his degree at Exeter he staged Büchner’s fractured militaristic tale Woyzeck in a disused Territorial Army barracks. “Lots of Punchdrunk conventions started there,” he says. “The whole space was used, the audience could piece the story together. But I knew it wouldn’t work if everyone was yabbering away. In bed one day, I had a eureka moment. Put them in masks. It’ll differentiate them. They’ll have to talk to their loved ones afterwards to make it all make sense.”
These conventions, together with a clutch of secret, one-on-one performances, hidden within the shows, is what enables Punchdrunk to deliver intimate experiences to very large audiences.
Barrett and two fellow students, Pete Higgin and Euan Maybank, formed Punchdrunk in 2000, producing their first show three weeks after graduating. “We would find empty buildings and beg people to give us the keys,” Barrett recalls. “It was lunatic. There was never enough money and we’d be pulling 18-hour days. One show we did was an hour-long one-on-one. Only four people got to see it because we could only afford to do it for one day. It was magic.”
The company moved to London in 2003, picking up the four more core team members on the way, sharing out the shows’ artistic and organisational responsibilities. Barrett now lives with his fiancée, a Tate media producer, in a converted Thames lighter barge that is designed to look like a garden from the outside and is accessed through a secret door in the turf.
However, the whole company are deeply conflicted about their sensational success. Predictably, a backlash began with Masque and found new fuel with Tunnel 228, earlier in the year. Fans complained that they couldn’t get in. Art critics sniffed that Emperor Punchdrunk was wearing some pretty shoddy clothes, compared with an immersive artist such as Christoph Büchel. Other site-specific practitioners grumbled that the form was as old as theatre itself.
Next year brings the company’s tenth anniversary and their first invitation to stage a show in America; Barrett is only too aware that it’s the company’s success that is now its greatest challenge. “We have to keep pushing, challenging ourselves, but the day we forget our audience is the day Punchdrunk’s little red light goes out. We never wanted to be a company with a big poster on the side of the building,” he says, squinting at the outsize It Felt Like a Kiss ad. “What we have to keep alive is the spirit of Steppenwolf that we started with. That little plaque [in the book], seen only by those who notice, which reads ‘magic theatre, for madmen only’. That’s Punchdrunk.”
It Felt Like a Kiss, Quay House, Spinningfields, Manchester, 0844 8154961, until July 19, returns only
