Felix Barratt is Artistic Director of Punchdrunk, the pioneering theater company that has taken immersive theater mainstream with a series of critically acclaimed shows for over twenty years. Here he talks about the company’s most important shows…
Mask of the Red Death
Battersea Arts Center (2007)
We had done some big shows in huge abandoned spaces. Faust had been in an old sorting office in Wapping and we gratefully had the support of the National. I think Tom Morris introduced us to his old stomping grounds at Battersea Arts Center and said that the next radical thing we could do, rather than taking over a disused space, would be to reinvent a workspace are.
So we had the other challenge of making a place that was known to many audiences completely unknown, of filling it with ghosts instead of activating it with the ghosts of the past.
It was an incredible space. David Jubb, artistic director of the BAC at the time, gave us carte blanche to reshape the space and open up backstage areas, old cupboards that were not being used. We could reinvent it knowing it would stay that way and be part of the overall renovation. It was really empowering and remarkable to have that carte blanche.
We asked for all kinds of things. Since it was an Edgar Allen Poe story, we said we needed a real fire, so they called in the chimney sweep. And then we said if we had a fire, we needed a cat. So they let us get a black cat, Pluto, who lived there for another fifteen years. It was great to do something that we knew would have a legacy.
People would explore space, but we realized they wanted something that ties everything together. BAC had a great big room that we kept behind so we could experience the excitement of the reveal in the last 20 minutes. I love a real crescendo and that’s what really crystallized that conceit.
The municipality
Aldeburgh (2013)
We do large-scale work with spectacle. We always try to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, whatever we do, whether it’s in front of an audience of 600 or an audience of one. This was for an audience of one. Instead of transforming a building, we transformed a city and had secret cats of forty people hidden among the real hustle and bustle of Aldeburgh.
That of other shows has always been the distilled form, the raw impact, the emotional sucker punch that we strive for. With The Borough we were allowed to create that for one audience member at a time using a soundtrack. We’ve done multiple headphone projects over the years, increasing their scale and impact. It was great to have an entire cityscape where the audience didn’t know if it was just a man walking his dog or an artist. So suddenly there was a cast of hundreds, but most were unaware of it.
There was one spectator every five to ten minutes. We’ve been doing these experiences for small audiences for the past twenty years and they are real gems. They don’t have the scale, but they are real gems. That’s the line of Viola’s Room, to scale up one of these experiences.
The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable
31 London Street (2013)
It was in an old sorting office. I remember seeing that building for the first time on January 5th and it opened six months later. From having no idea, walking around it with our eyes open, to planning, building and rehearsing it, it all happened incredibly quickly and with the skin of our teeth. But it responded correctly to the site. It was a glorious rollercoaster.
If an audience knows what’s going to happen, why do that? My philosophy is to always change the rules as we go, so that they always remain in the background and have to succumb to them. That’s the best way to experience art, if you’re swept away by it.
We had been so construction dependent. We lost that space to Crossrail, so there was always a ticking clock on it. Every building we have used now has been demolished. It was a beautiful moment that we found that space in such a central location. It gave us wonderful propulsion, but it took us a long time to find such a large space in London. It brought us to great things internationally, but in our home city it took a long time before we found a follow-up.
The third day
Aerial Arts (2020)
The original plan was to try to make a compelling TV show. You would be watching a TV show and the story was followed in real time and the main character, Jude Law, stumbles upon a festival on the Essex coast, the audience could get in the car and go to it. It would happen in real time and you could be part of it. There were many years of planning and HBO and Sky were ready. But we succumbed to Covid.
So within a few weeks we had to go from an audience of 6,000 people on an island to an audience of one audience, namely the camera, following the twelve-hour action. It was a complete experiment, because it became a kind of slow cinema. Jude was on screen in character for nine hours.
We didn’t know what was going to happen. When we started, we knew we couldn’t stop. It was 12 hours of rolling action. Working with Dennis Kelly, the playwright, there was three hours of TV, the live broadcast and then another three hours of TV.
We had an incredible cast and crew and it was exciting to accidentally do something that felt like we were breaking new ground and doing new things. So much so that we are planning things going back to that area.
Jude was a fan of the work and we started talking about what we could do together. He was fantastic. He literally had to dig his own grave for an hour, in real time. The blisters and welts on his hands are all real. It was almost a piece of live art.
We were happy with it. It was such an anomaly. It was broadcast live on Sky Arts here and on a digital platform in the US. We found that people just put it on, were hooked on it, and stayed with it all day long. All the talk and social media suddenly had the same feeling of live theater. It posed the danger of knowing they were watching it in real time. It was just on a screen, not in a live room.
The burned city
One cartridge location (2022)
However, many shows have failed when we have found buildings that disappear for whatever reason – asbestos, change of ownership. So we planned The Burnt City for another building before The Drowned Man. It was two connected buildings and we knew we wanted to emulate the Greeks and tell two sides of the same story. The fall of Troy felt perfect, but we lost the building. It should have opened in 2010.
After Drowned Man we did a lot of international work. We realized that we had been nomadic and that London is our home and that we needed to put down roots and settle down a bit. We had been doing shows in New York and Shanghai for a long time, and we wanted to do that in London too, so we started looking for a house.
The Royal Borough of Greenwich were brilliant and offered us Woolwich Arsenal, and by some miracle there were two buildings connected, so we thought we could get back to the show we almost made in Holborn. It was a chance reawakening of an old idea that fit perfectly in the space. There was a bigger figure in it: the height of it. But the ideas were all there.
We decided to go to a place of purity and physicality in this show. It was a conscious choice, knowing that the language also appears in other work. The artists were amazing to keep that up for a year and a half. It gave us the opportunity to launch the building and finally have our own space in our hometown. It was a real gift.
Viola’s room
One cartridge location (2024)
This is the first time we have returned to a space. We’ve always done one show and then moved on. Next year will be the 25th anniversary. The building is so rich that we thought if we treated it as our version of an arts center, it would have so much to offer. It has completely changed our thinking. We thought: what is our version of the Southbank Center with different spaces and environments, and where different shows could take place at the same time. It doesn’t have to be one big show, but several smaller ones.
Viola’s Room is on a more discrete scale so we can do other things at the same time. We have made plans for the future that a complete takeover of the building will also take place. It’s great that the public knows where to find us and gets in touch with the municipality in the right way.
It is described as an audio-driven journey for a moonlit fever dream. It’s based on the audio-driven, headphone-based shows we’ve done in the past. It is a bedtime story that takes you into the dream world. It’s linear, it has text and a story. It is deliberately a different flavor that brings something new to the building after The Burnt City. But it has our whole vibe going back to one on one and pure distilled Punchdrunk moments. It’s actually one to one on a larger scale. You can enter alone or with a maximum of six people.
There are no live artists, there is no need for that. It’s about the absence of people. It is an opportunity for the installation, the soundscape, the lighting and the design to go a step further. When we build a show, one discipline does not take precedence over the other. The light is a character, the sound is crucial. It’s smaller in scale, but it will feel just as epic.
In 2002, when I had just left university and moved back to London. We were trying to find £1000 to do a show and called every neighborhood to see if there was a building we could find for free. Someone said we should watch Woolwich Arsenal, so I dutifully went downstairs. I saw the size of these huge warehouses, we only had £1,000 and it was deserted. But here we are, 24 years later, and now in that incredible expanse of space as our home, being able to plan the next phase of work is incredible. It gives us the opportunity to be much more productive. Instead of having to spend half our year finding the buildings and getting the permits, that is now the case. So all our attention goes to creating work.
What’s really exciting about this next phase is that there are a lot more things being brought to market, it’s a real treat.
Viola’s Room opens June 3 at One Cartridge Place; punchdrunk.com