A little over a year since I stepped into Punchdrunk’s astonishing interactive theatre experience The Burnt City, the company has reopened its doors in Woolwich, London, for a vastly different production.
For those who don’t know Punchdrunk, the company behind uniquely explorable, interactive and almost video game-like productions such as The Drowned Man, Shakespeare retellings such as Sleep No More and Doctor Who spin-off The Crash of the Elysium, the outfit is famed for their Choose Your Own Adventure approach to storytelling. But the troupe’s latest creation, Viola’s Room, is something a little different.
I experienced The Burnt City, a nearly three-hour sprawling odyssey of mythical Greek storytelling and sacrifice played out over a series of cavernous spaces, just days after a particularly difficult moment in my life. The opportunity to then lose myself completely in that show’s labyrinthine spaces and storytelling for hours was something that will stay with me for a very long time. Its structure was deliberately complex, a web of narrative performed by an enormous cast of actors and dancers moving around elaborate sets on a schedule that ran like clockwork, their stories intertwining at key moments and in specific spaces with explosively violent or strikingly intimate results. I had always meant to go back and see it again, multiple times, especially after delving deep into Punchdrunk’s fan reddits and wikis and learning more about its story and many secrets. Some diehard fans saw more than 100 performances. But I never managed to find time before it closed – and its enormously ambitious nature meant affordable tickets were few and far between.
Viola’s Room is something far more accessible. On the one hand, Punchdrunk has said it is a return to its earliest origins: a retelling of a 2000 production named The Moonslave designed for just a single audience member at a time, which reportedly only four people ever saw. On the other hand, and more helpfully, this is a deliberately smaller-scale and easier to consume experience than The Burnt City, aimed at a wider audience in terms of content and cost.
I deliberately knew nothing of Viola’s Room before heading in, other than the advisories you must acknowledge when booking a ticket. The experience is for small groups of up to six, and you enter barefoot – there’s a storage area for your shoes and socks, and foot sanitisation is encouraged. Much of the experience is in low light, some of it in blackout. And the biggest change of all – there are no performers, or at least, no staff visible throughout. (Talking to a production member afterwards, they acknowledged each group’s experience is closely monitored and managed behind the scenes.)