While the company has been busy establishing itself as a global brand, most notably with their acclaimed riff on Macbeth, Sleep No More, which opened in New York in 2011 and in Shanghai in 2016, a host of pale imitators have sprung up in their wake. Secret Cinema, The Great Gatsby, Doctor Who: Time Fracture, the woefully bad The Wolf of Wall Street – much of immersive theatre now resembles office-party-style entertainment, with the showy stage sets, good-time atmospherics (and a bar selling overpriced drinks) combining to produce a glib, formulaic theatricality. Can Punchdrunk rescue a genre that seems to have hit a creative wall?
Barrett thinks they can. “Part of the reason we have been away from London for so long is that it’s taken us years to find a space big enough for our plans,” he says – the Woolwich buildings, part of the ongoing regeneration of the former arsenal, will combine a permanent performance space with a “laboratory” to test out new ways of immersing audiences deeper into the narrative, including virtual reality, body scanning and projection mapping.
In 2017, the company produced Kabeiroi, an adaptation of a play by Aeschylus, which used smartphones to lead audiences through a treasure-hunt-style narrative across London. “Performed” for only two members of the public at a time, and lasting more than six hours, the production was experienced by a limited number of people. “Kabeiroi was a baby step in how you might scale a show that ‘gamified’ real life,” says Barrett.
“We’ve always used gaming techniques in our shows [long-running productions are accompanied by websites that allow users to compare the best routes to follow] and we are currently very interested in how you might take a show like The Burnt City out of the building and on to the streets. All this is for the future; the logistics are boggling. But it’s the liveness that’s important; those moments of human connection only theatre can bring. I’ve no interest in VR goggles, for instance. For me, the question is how you make the audience the hero of their own story in ways that are tech-enabled, but also happening in real life.”
None of this tech experimentation comes cheap. Punchdrunk are commercially savvy and in the past have worked on promotional campaigns for several high-profile brands, including Stella Artois and Louis Vuitton. The Burnt City, meanwhile, is sponsored by Porsche. Yet these hook-ups have prompted accusations from some quarters of selling out, of the company losing sight of what it stands for. Barrett is having none of it.
“Each time we’ve worked with a brand, we’ve done so to further an artistic idea. Yes, we get an Arts Council grant. But if Stella Artois come to us to create a story involving cars travelling across London, then, of course, we are going to say ‘Yes’. We cracked new ideas in that campaign that fed into Kabeiroi.”
