Shakespeare Exploded Guide: Get Punchdrunk

Wandering through a forest at night, you stumble on two women arguing. They are Gretchen and her mother from Goethe’s Faust.  Suddenly, Gretchen throws herself belly-first against a wall, repeating her violent action to ensure she kills her unborn child.  The moon streaming through the pine trees both illuminates and obscures her struggle.  This is not a dream.  This is not reality.  This is Punchdrunk.

Britain’s edgy Punchdrunk theatre company makes its U.S. debut at the American Repertory Theater this fall.  Inspired by Shakespeare and Hitchcock, Sleep No More exemplifies the company’s brand of “adventure theater,” a genre that creates a complex visual environment that surrounds the audience.

Punchdrunk wants the audience to “rediscover the excitement of exploring the unknown.”  Yet the term “adventure theater” does not do justice to a Punchdrunk event – a site-sympathetic encounter that engages all five senses to create a rush. When the audience arrives at the site, they receive a prop – which must remain secret until entry – that provides a sense of freedom and anonymity, sparking a voyeuristic ambience as audience members find themselves watching violent seductions within reach.  Anonymity contributes to the thrill as you enter the unknown.

Punchdrunk productions occur in transformed “secret locations.”  A Punchdrunk installation converts a chosen location with period-specific décor, objects, and atmospheric lighting.  Rather than sitting down to watch the show, the audience travels freely through these rooms.  In addition to Faust’s pine-scented, moonlit forest, other floors of its London warehouse contained dark, candlelit hallways, a movie theater playing a black-and-white film, and a bar.  In Punchdrunk’s The Masque of the Red Death audiences drifted through an opium den, a Victorian sitting room, an ornate ballroom, and a carnival.  Punchdrunk surrounds the audience with a fusion of live performance, music and installation.

With so many locations within one site, the audience must discover for itself how to find their way through this strange world.  One approach is to follow the major characters; another way is to investigate the environment.  Sometimes the most memorable moments come from exploring the installation randomly.  It is amazing to stumble alone on a character in one of the rooms, accidentally discover one of the major scenes of the play, or interact with one of the actors.

The production is a bit like a video game.  But the level of absorption is more exciting and scary. Punchdrunk performances make you feel punch-drunk – dazed, confused, exhilarated.  Each sense is heightened, including taste.  In Faust, actors invited audience members to have a shot at the bar, and they were delighted when they tasted real alcohol.

Yet the most stunning aspect of a Punchdrunk production is the performance itself.  The actors’ movement is spectacular and their physicality fulfills a narrative function.  Punchdrunk’s physical theater conveys both plot and character without dialogue.  Whether through tortured solos in cages, dancing on tables in a diner, or a dance sequence that includes the audience, their fluid and sensuous movement communicates the play’s obsessions on a visceral level.  Rejecting the proscenium, Punchdrunk moves its audience through a sense-stimulating alternative world to arrive at a new understanding of the work.

Although Punchdrunk’s relationship to the original text varies from production to production, certain themes recur in their performance: lust, sin, death, and dark magic.  In the end the production is a riff on the original.  Based on where the audience decides to go and when, everyone constructs a different adventure.

Punchdrunk’s website quotes Oedipus at Colonus: “These things are mysteries, not to be explained; But you will understand when you get there alone.” This is true of the Punchdrunk experience itself…you will understand after you get there, alone.

Sara Bookin-Weiner is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./ MXAT School Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University