The Punchdrunk Theatre is best known for its airplane hangar-sized sets filled with dozens of actors, hundreds of audience members, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of painstakingly hand-crafted ephemera. In contrast, Viola’s Room is a quiet, intimate affair, a single story played out in a small group over just 45 minutes.
Co-director of the world’s leading immersive theatre company Hector Harkness tells us what inspired us to take this change of direction.
How is Punchdrunk located in Woolwich?
For us, it’s a real turning point to have a facility where we can continue to experiment and properly nurture new ideas like Viola’s Room. For someone creating artistic work on a large scale, it’s not easy to find spaces to do that in London, so we’re very lucky to have found these huge halls in Woolwich that are a blank canvas for our ideas. Like most theatre companies, we need to be in one place together and work together face to face, and this allows us to do that.
Her new show Viola’s Room sounds very intimate…
At Punchdrunk we’re always trying to break new ground. After our last London show, ‘The Burnt City’, we wanted to try something different. We’re using everything we’ve learned over the last 20 years and trying to tell a story in a new way and give the audience a really intimate experience. Most of our big shows involve one-on-one experiences, where there are small, intimate encounters between an audience member and the performers. It feels like a big one-on-one experience!
Tell us the story
The show is based on a Victorian gothic horror called The Moonslave. It’s a brilliant, mysterious and enigmatic short story and it was the inspiration for an intimate one-person show that Punchdrunk created very early in our existence. Now we’ve decided to revisit the story and reinterpret it. Together with writer Daisy Johnson, we’ve turned it into a new kind of adventure.
How important is technology?
This is not a technology-based experience at all. Headphones are used in so many different ways in our everyday lives that we don’t find their use intrusive. They allow us to make people feel completely connected to the narrator and the sounds occurring during the journey, which are interwoven with her story. The environment is very closed off, but the sound opens it up and plays an essential role in stimulating the imagination of the viewers.
What do you hope the audience will take away from this?
I want people to be transported to a different state than the one they went in in. Hopefully it will provide that magical thrill of being read a bedtime story before you go to sleep and drifting off to dreamland. And if people wake up from that dream feeling like they’ve had a mind-altering adventure, then we’ve done our job.
Can you tell us a little more about the experience?
It’s a very different kind of physical experience. Previous Punchdrunk shows have been partly about the thrill of exploring a room at will and creating your own adventure. In Viola’s Room, you flow through a story beat by beat, riding the wave away. We ask the audience to step into the darkness and let us take their hands on a journey.
• To book, go to the website here
