Punchdrunk Theatre is best known for its aircraft-hanger sized sets filled with dozens of actors, hundreds of audience members and hundreds of thousands of painstakingly hand-crafted pieces of ephemera. In contrast, Viola’s Room is a quiet, intimate thing, a single story taking place in a small group over just 45 minutes.
Co-director of the world-leading immersive theatre troupe Hector Harkness tells us what inspired this change of direction.
How is Punchdrunk settled in Woolwich?
It’s a real game changer for us to have a facility where we can keep experimenting and give proper resource to new ideas like Viola’s Room. It’s not easy for anyone creating artistic work at scale to find places to do it in London so we’re very lucky to have found these massive sheds in Woolwich that are a blank canvas for our ideas. Like most theatre companies, we need to be in a space together, collaborating face to face, and it allows us to do that.
Your new show Viola’s Room sounds very intimate…
At Punchdrunk we are always trying to break new ground. After our last London show The Burnt City we wanted to try something different. Using everything we have learnt over the last 20 years, we are trying to tell a story in a new way, giving audiences a really intimate experience. Most of our big shows contain one-on-one experiences that allow for small, intimate encounters to happen between an audience member and performers. This feels like one big one-to-one experience!
Tell us about the story
The show is based on a Victorian gothic horror called The Moonslave. It’s a brilliantly mysterious and enigmatic short story, and it was the inspiration for an intimate one-person show Punchdrunk created very early in our existence. Now we’ve decided to revisit the story and reimagine it, working with the writer Daisy Johnson to turn it into a new kind of adventure.
How important is the technology?
This is not a technology-led experience at all. Headphones are used in so many different ways in our everyday lives that we don’t feel the use of them is intrusive. They allow us to make people feel completely connected to the narrator and the sounds manifested throughout the journey that are intertwined in her story. The environment is very enclosed but the sound opens it up and plays an integral part in stimulating audience members’ imaginations.
What do you hope audiences will take from it?
I’d like it to take people into a different state to the one they entered in. Hopefully it’ll have the magical thrill of being read a bedtime story and slipping off into dreamland. And if people emerge from that dream feeling like they’ve been on a mind-bending adventure, we’ve done our job.
Can you tease a little more about the experience?
It’s a very different kind of physical experience. Previous Punchdrunk shows are partly about the thrill of exploring a space at will and piecing together your own adventure. In Viola’s Room you’ll flow through a story, beat by beat, riding the wave of it. We’re asking audiences to step into the dark and let us take their hands on a journey.
• To book go to the website here