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Puzzled Over

The Primary Vivid American Newspaper

The world of immersive theatre is now a broad church indeed. It’s a word Barrett consistently resists using. “We’ve never been one to try to define,” he says. “I think if you can define it, then it’s less exciting for an audience. I’m driven by trying to ask questions of form, and trying to pre-empt things, or explore nooks and crannies that have yet to have a torchlight shone into them. Immersive is such a buzzword – but there’s a new word coming.” And for Barrett, where this new language will come from is through more cross-discipline exploration, in particular the fusing of immersive work with game mechanics. The seeds of this were sown years ago when Sleep No More was listed as the game of the year in an American newspaper round-up. “They reviewed the show as if it were a video game,” Barrett remembers. “And it was a real penny-drop moment. And so we tried to deconstruct the mechanics of games and understand them and really see what could be taken to evolve the form. Audiences are craving autonomy and agency.”

Anna James interviewing Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett for The Stage

Previously: All Things Pass. Only Vision Persists.

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Best Of Narrated

All Things Pass. Only Vision Persists.

What is the appropriate reaction when you discover your words became a small part of history, and maybe influenced the future, for something you hold dear?


Last Friday on the Giant Beastcast, Dan Ryckert recounted his recent first trip to Sleep No More. (The discussion starts around 48:00.) I appreciated the conversation happening on a gaming podcast because the connection of the Punchdrunk show to gaming concepts has always been part of my worldview. Michael Abbott’s post drawing those parallels was part of what drove me to the show originally. I was so enamored with the execution of this theatre/game hybrid, I named Sleep No More my “Game Of The Year” for 2011 over titles like Bastion and Skyrim. (The piece also included what could be charitably called a walkthrough as well as a list of achievements.)

This morning, with the memories of SNM still dancing in my subconscious, I finally cracked open my copy of The Punchdrunk Encyclopaedia. Published this past December, the book covers the history of Punchdrunk, their projects, and their immersive theatre design concepts in an enjoyable non-linear way. The encyclopedia format, with cross-references between entries and occasional full-page related topics, allows you to wander between concepts like you would an immersive set.

My read was fairly linear, going A-Z and spending time on the concepts I wanted to know more about. And just as I was about to put the book down, at the “References and Further Reading” appendix, my eyes flicked to the corner and grew wide:

Why was I being referenced in the official history of Punchdrunk in any capacity? I quickly fired a text to Kathryn Yu, friend / managing editor of No Proscenium / my original shepherd into the world of immersive theatre.

After some random entry checks, I struck gold on the entry for gaming. With a closer read than my first pass, found this quote:

“We didn’t set out to build work to be like first-person computer games. Instead, as our productions became more intricate and detailed it was a lens through which audiences began to view and compare the work. We recognise that the work offers fully realised realities within which audiences are immersed. Immersion of this depth is addictive and those interested in gaming feel the work offers a physical alternative to gaming. Just as games are played many times over, audiences return again and again to Punchdrunk worlds; with Sleep No More, NYC, an audience member who frequented the production reviewed it as one of his top ten games [see Dickinson 2011].”

– Peter Higgin, Punchdrunk Director of Enrichment

Finding yourself referenced in a book without warning would’ve been enough to weird me out for the day. But then came a text from Kathryn: “I FOUND IT” and a link to a recent Guardian article:

This was a turn I wasn’t prepared for.

But something strange happened after Punchdrunk brought Sleep No More to New York in 2011.

“We had an amazing weird moment when the papers and blogs were doing their round ups of ‘best album of the year’, ‘best film of the year’ and so on,” [Felix] Barrett remembers. “In one of them, Sleep No More got ‘best game of the year’”. The article described the show using gaming vocabulary and vernacular. Its hidden secrets were “Easter eggs,” while discovering a new floor was “levelling up”, and the choice of where to go made it an “open world”.

“When we were described as a video game I started going back to games to find out more about them, to unpack it, and learn more about game mechanics,” says Barrett. He realised while Punchdrunk wasn’t “ever directly inspired by an open-world game”, open worlds give birth to choice, which creates a new way to tell stories – similar to what he was trying to achieve in theatre.

– Alysia Judge, “‘Playable shows are the future’: what Punchdrunk theatre learned from games

Some Googling reveals that I appear to have been the only person who ever declared the show “game of the year”. Which means Felix Barrett read that blog post and considered it an “amazing weird moment”.

Wait, there’s more:

“That crazy space between video games and theatre, I reckon is the next frontier. […] I’m taking literal game mechanics to enter theatre … That’s totally what we’re doing. Asking questions in that space. […] I actually don’t think there’s a vocabulary for it yet. For a while, ‘immersive theatre’ was bandied about, but whatever this new thing is called, playable shows are the future.”

– Felix Barrett

So…Felix Barrett read that blog post, considered it an amazing weird moment, and it may have triggered him down a path of deeper consideration of how to marry game mechanics theater, and that’s what Punchdrunk is working on now?

That’s one hell of a one-on-one.

I lay no claim to originating the idea of comparing immersive theatre to gaming. (Again, Michael Abbott’s post put the idea in my head long before I ever attended.) And I don’t dare believe that my words alone sent Punchdrunk down whatever creative rabbit hole they’re currently exploring.

But there’s something bewitching about my words echoing back seven years later in this way, in the book in my hands and the subhead copy on my screen. To know that I left even a small imprint on the Punchdrunk team, in the subconscious way that their shows did on me, makes me glow a little.

(Felix, Peter – if either of you somehow end up back on this small corner of the internet and read this, I’m not sure what to say except: thank you both.)

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Best Of Enjoyed

Walking In The Sand: Belated Thoughts On Punchdrunk’s “The Drowned Man”

In October, as part of our vacation to London, we took in two viewings of Punchdrunk’s latest production, The Drowned Man. Despite promises to write about it, I never did.

The show ended its run tonight. So what better time to finally try to draw some thoughts together than tonight, after the show can never be seen again?

The general format is, for the most part, as it was for Sleep No More: the masks; the loops; the roughly three hours; a vast space to explore.

The story is not Shakespeare, but instead Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck crossed with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. The narrative is expressed through two parallel tracks running almost in mirrors through the space. It is not a 1920’s hotel in Scotland (actually a six story building in Chelsea), but a 1960’s American movie studio and surrounding village (actually an abandoned post office opposite Paddington Station). The cast feels exponentially larger: eight per “side” of the story, with fourteen in the middle, for a combined cast of around thirty.

With the mechanics out of the way, here are my scattered memories of the two visits, eight months removed:

After far too many visits to SNM, the struggle of trying to figure out a new space was such a joy. My mental map for the McKittrick is a seared memory, so to be faced with four gigantic floors and no sense of where anything was felt very liberating. It was also terrifying for the first hour, as the fear of missing out comes on strong.

I had always felt a little disappointment that there wasn’t more to be found in Sleep No More that was truly hidden – I’m aware of one passageway, and I was taken through it in my first visit. But the space in Temple Studios was full of these rooms – hidden behind curtains, across darkened hallways, and through tunnels in the sand. This made me ridiculously happy on multiple levels, and all of the rooms had that level of Punchdrunk set dressing love that I remembered so fondly. The reel-to-reel room, the sunflower room, the foley room; the entire desert floor, the church, the wardrobe; the Masonic Temple, the board room, the drugstore…so many of the rooms are unforgettable.

The soundtrack was impeccable, a mix of early 60’s American classics (think Shangri-Las and Avalons) and, strangely enough, the soundtrack from Perfume – The Story of a Murderer. “The Method Works!” is the most parallel to the use of Bernard Herman’s “Prelude and Rooftop” from SNM.

Casting was unsurprisingly strong, and it’s hard to not to want to give Sam Booth (in the above video) credit for his portrayal of Leland Stanford. He looms large over the goings-on, and hit just the right air of confident, disarming, and haunting.

It is rather tragic that TDM has come to a close, and while part of me wants to hope they’ll shut down SNM and convert the space, I also know that there aren’t many places in NYC that could contain that show. The space was truly massive, and as the obsessives on the TDM Spoilers FB group have detailed with the map, used very creatively. The majority of one of the floors was converted to an abandoned car park specifically for two characters to do one-on-ones in. I want to see the show live on, but I know the odds are slim.

If there is a lasting memory to be had of the show, it is this:

On our second visit, I applied the Don’t Stick Around For Scenes You’ve Already Seen rule, zipping out of a room if I got even the sense that I had perceived it before. Within my first half an hour, I came across a distraught woman in the saloon, being strongly compelled onto a stage. I stood close by and watched as Faye Greener – being played that night by Miranda Mac Letten – lip synced her way through Walking In The Sand by The Shangri-Las. It ended with her in tears, being comforted by her husband Harry, and returning to their run down room in the local motel.

That moment itself wasn’t the lasting memory. It was later in that show, when I happened into the same part of the loop and again saw Faye move towards the stage. And despite my better judgement and knowing I should go see someone else? I stayed put. It was that strong – that convincing – that I couldn’t look away.

And ultimately, that’s what I want out of theatre, and why I keep going back to immersive shows. I want the heart to win out over the head.

The Drowned Man is now closed. You can never go home anymore.