Punch-drunk and reeling ....

Dear Sheddists,

it's not just the photography course that occupies my attentions during the recent sabbatical visit to London.  On Wednesday evening I take the tube to Paddington and join a growing queue outside a huge disused warehouse just round the corner from the station.  We've come to see Punchdrunk's production, 'The Drowned Man', an interactive play based loosely on Georg Buchner's, 'Woyzeck' and the warehouse is the venue for Temple Studios, a mythological Hollywood film-set.

We're shepherded into neat lines, issued with identical porcelain-white masks to be worn for the duration of the performance and instructed to remain silent at all times.  We're then released into a dimly-lit labyrinthine corridor that twists first one way then another until at last we arrive at the doors of an old-fashioned elevator shaft.  The lift opens and we're beckoned in by a commanding concierge.  Once the doors close safe behind he provides the very briefest of introductions to just a few of the characters we will encounter during the night before ushering us out into the bottom floor of the warehouse.

It, too, is dimly lit but a little further investigation reveals it to be the setting for a 1940s American trailer park. We're left to roam, exploring the trailer-vans and surrounding areas in criss-crossing streams of white-porcelained solemnity.  The intricate detail of the set is breath-taking; there are artifacts, posters, personal belongings. letters, photographs - all of which we are free to look at, pick up and examine to our hearts content.  The letters, in particular, provide a number of a clues to the story that's about to unfold.

The braver members of the six-hundred strong audience begin to venture beyond the trailer-park to discover a deserted chapel, complete with over-flowing bath-tub and penitent rosaries, and on the other side of the floor a Wild-west film-set.  Already, the boundaries between what is 'real' and what is recreated have dissolved into a misty hallucinogenic haze.

The first of the cast appears, a distraught lady, who leads away a number of the audience in the direction of a saloon-bar as her part of the story begins to unfold.  But hers is but one of many and before long there are actors running this way and that, cutting and dicing the audience over and over again as we seek to keep up.

Apparently unconnected scenes unfold before us.  Spurned lovers, shoot-outs and beatings, a bar-room serenade, a series of dressing-room dramas - the paths of the actors and their following audiences intertwined up and down the four levels of the warehouse.

Over the course of two and half hours it's absolutely impossible to keep up with more than a few strands of the story, but this fragmented quality just adds to the immersive and disorientating experience of the event. Each floor contains a number of different sets to explore, many of which mirror or mimic those on another level.  The scariest of all is at the very top of the warehouse where the Sand-witch lives.  Her lair includes a recreated funeral, complete with rows of straw-filled, motionless dummies.

As time passes the action becomes more and more frenetic until at last all the audience is brought together in the one set for the climax of the performance. I won't spoil the show by telling you what it is .. even if I had understood it!

We leave the warehouse, Punchdrunk and reeling ... what an evening!

Find out more here ...

best regards,

electrofried(mr)