If all the world is a stage, then Felix Barrett is first in line to be its director. Standing in a fake pub, in a fake village, in a former futon assembly factory on an industrial estate in north London, Barrett is explaining his vision for the future of Punchdrunk, the immersive theatre company he founded in 2000. “We have our drinks here on a Friday and when it’s chilly we shelter by the fire,” Barrett says, shuffling towards the fully-stocked but completely fake bar. This is Fallow Cross, a warehouse-sized test lab where Punchdrunk is cooking up ideas for its next major production. After making its name with lavish shows in London, New York and Shanghai, Punchdrunk’s current development will be its first major production in more than half a decade. And it will be quite unlike anything that has gone before.
The need for new ideas is long overdue. It may have started life as an experimental theatre upstart, but Punchdrunk now operates on dizzying scales and partners with corporate clients ranging from Absolut Vodka to Samsung. Sleep No More, a production based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, has been running in New York since 2011, covering five floors and over 9,300-square metres of a disused building in downtown Manhattan. The production launched on a similar scale in Shanghai in 2016. But immersive theatre has had its moment. The format is showing its age, with a plethora of copycats following with similarly sprawling productions.
For all its critical acclaim, Punchdrunk has become a victim of its own hype. In September 2017, the firm announced it would be holding a limited run of a new production inspired by an ancient Greek myth. Kabeiroi was seen by just 864 people during its month-long run in central London. Critics complained that they weren’t able to review it and fans complained getting tickets was a near-impossibility. But Barrett is unconcerned by outside pressures. “It was a test,” he says. “There’s a big question I have been asking for a long time: our shows take place over a building with 90 rooms – what happens if you can take those 90 rooms and scatter them across the city?”
Kabeiroi was the first large-scale trial of that theory. The hour-long preview I experienced in October, which culminated in a well-hidden actor making me leap into the air in fear, did just that: it took Punchdrunk’s productions, and its audience, out of their respective comfort zones. No masks, no elaborate set design, no interpretive dance: just you, your companion, a locked-down smartphone and a sense of cloying terror.
Just as Barrett’s productions blur the line between performance and reality, so does his own life. He says the best show he has ever seen was his own stag party – a four month long, whirlwind trail of clues and performances, the final mystery of which was revealed on his wedding day. That wedding, in December 2010 to Tate producer Kate Vogel, also bore all the trademarks of a Punchdrunk production – the photographer described it as “The Flaming Lips meets Chekhov”. It’s a template-of-sorts that has been applied to nearly all of Punchdrunk’s major productions since the company was founded. But what was once theatrical innovation is in need of a rethink.
“We feel now is the time to come back to those other forms,” Barrett says when I ask him about Punchdrunk’s trope of using masks to hide audience members’ faces. “Because if the audience knows what to expect, then it’s less high impact.” Getting people out of their comfort zones, he concludes, is what ramps up the excitement – and that’s what gets Barrett thinking creatively. “You have to choose whether you go up those stairs or along that corridor, whether you are enjoying it or not, sensorially you are so much more engaged.”
And so, having broken down the fourth wall, Barrett is now trying to rip up the foundations. Which is where the pub and the fake village of Fallow Cross come in. The Oracles, which ran from June to November 2017, is designed as a live experiment. On the face of it, the production is classic Punchdrunk – lavish sets, moody lighting and a spooky feel – but this production is quite different. First, it was only open to schoolchildren from the Haringey area. Second, it’s deceptively high-tech. “Their minds are so malleable, and you can see the impact it has,” Barrett says of Punchdrunk’s decision to test future productions on groups of schoolchildren rather than paying adults. “There is no cynicism, they believe it, they get it head on.”
The production starts in the classroom with a simple video game, developed by Punchdrunk’s in-house designer. Then the children are invited to continue their quest in the real-world, at which point the pixels comes to life in the vast, movie-set world of Fallow Cross. It’s like stepping into Tim Burton’s Wendy house. “It’s a video game that goes live. You become your own avatar in the real world as well as the digital space,” Barrett says. It’s a remarkable set design, though the real innovation is happening out of sight.
While exploring Fallow Cross, children carry what looks like a lantern but is in fact a positional tracking device. Working in partnership with Google, Punchdrunk has rigged the whole space with sensors that track the lanterns with pinpoint accuracy. As groups learn new skills and level-up they unlock new areas in the physical world, with the lamp opening a series of locked doors. “If they are a level three player they can’t get in, if they are a level four the door is open,” Barrett says, enthusiastically rattling a locked door for emphasis.
So while the look and overall feel of Punchdrunk might not change hugely, how the audience experiences its productions will. Think more interaction, smartphone tracking and scenes that are acted out not by humans but by technology. “A lot of this space is just us trying to brainstorm,” Barrett explains as we peak through a crack in the door of a tiny chapel at the centre of Punchdrunk’s testing lab. “It’s a lot better than being in a white sterile office.” A mess of long hair and baggy clothes, Barrett – like his productions – looks deliberately distressed and disheveled. He skips and lurches as he walks and has the air of someone who constantly forgets why they have walked into a room.
Fallow Cross represents a ramshackle brain dump, a collection of experiments and half-formed ideas, any of which Barrett believes could form the core of future Punchdrunk productions. And after half a decade of research and development, Barrett’s impatience is tangible. “How do you do a show that takes place in the real world where you become your own hero?” he says. “So many of these ideas have been dormant. And this is actually us trying to push ourselves to practically trial it. Because my gosh, it’s the future of our work.”
Punchdrunk’s current headquarters are as disarmingly inauspicious as its productions. Walk through the industrial estate on which it's housed, and you’d never guess what’s going on inside. Nestled between the warehouses that hide Fallow Cross, around 30 staff tap away on computers and calmly put finishing touches to sets in preparation for rehearsals. There’s stuff everywhere, making the office feel like a cross between a flea market and a Macbook-adorned startup. On the walls, scraps of paper and scribbled notes hint at future plans. “It’s awesome we’ve got a board room for the first time,” Barrett says with an air of childish excitement.
His pitch for the future of Punchdrunk, and immersive theatre in general, keeps coming back to one key tenet: video games. Words to that effect are even scrawled onto one of the office walls. The physical constraints of Punchdrunk’s big-budget productions to date – dozens of rooms all within one building – is, according to Barrett, only a limitation of technology. At Fallow Cross, you get a glimpse of where its productions will go next. “I grew up wanting to be inside the game, rather than playing it,” Barrett says as we traverse the market square at the centre of Fallow Cross. A wonky row of buildings leads up to it, with a dimly-lit church at the centre. All the buildings are made of wood and every room is stuffed with props and bric-a-brac. The air smells of mulch. “I think that now, ten years after the launch of the iPhone, that is quite easily achievable in a way that it would have been a pipe-dream seven years ago.”
Barrett points to games such as Ingress and Pokémon Go and explains how Kabeiroi used an intricate, smartphone-based tracking and control system to keep players immersed in the production. “You are being controlled by ‘air traffic controllers’ who are trying to schedule you, get you into spaces so you don’t hit other audience members. The logistics of it is so complicated.” Another major change, and one that Barrett hints might become a fixture in future productions: no more masks. “We are trying to broaden our theatrical vocabulary,” he says. “The mask is one way, but it is still actually quite passive because even though you have got a choice, you are still protected. You are not exposed. It is the equivalent to your chair, because it establishes you as audience. Whereas in the real world, with no mask, in your normal clothes, with you driving the action forwards – you are exposed and there is more inherent danger.”
Kabeiroi, as is the case with so many Punchdrunk productions, continually delights in fear. For this, Barrett draws on another video game inspiration. “I grew up with some of the classics like the first Resident Evil,” he says. “What I liked was not the shooting and killing, actually any of the violence, it was just the empty space and traversing the environments.” The game’s infamously clunky control system and use of obfuscating camera angles is hinted at throughout Barrett’s work. In Punchdrunk, as in Capcom’s masterpiece, you never quite know where you are going or what’s going to scare you next. In Kabeiroi, out on the banal streets of London, even ordinary members of the public take on an eerie, unsettling hue. Suddenly, anyone could be an actor, anyone could be a threat. It’s a neat, paranoia-inducing trick.
As we weave our way through another of Fallow Cross’s narrow streets, a clutch of Punchdrunk staff calmly makes final preparations for a rehearsal. Barrett quickens his pace, ducking into an empty, wood-panelled room, spinning on his heels as he comes to a stop. The excitement in his gesticulations suggest the company’s experiments won’t remain behind closed doors for long. While production companies such as The Void experiment with epic-scale virtual reality, Barrett is more interested in using technology to augment the real world. “The Void is all about adventures and aliens, what’s the theatrical equivalent? What do you do in digitalised VR that is narrative? VR is all like, ‘Oh, look at this, it’s exciting’. It’s just so blunt.” Working with Bowers and Wilkins, Punchdrunk has tricked-out a waterbed with industrial-sized bass drivers that vibrate up through the mattress. “You can listen to something and the bass frequency will actually physically manipulate you.” Think the Nintendo 64’s Rumble Pak, but gigantic... and hidden inside a bed. In another experiment, Punchdrunk is working with Neo Sensory to implement vibrating, haptic feedback vests into theatre productions. “What happens if you have an audience member with no sight? Can technology actually operate as a guide?” In a future Punchdrunk show, haptic feedback could push and pull audience members through pitch black rooms, he explains. That’s a key difference: the technology has to be a tool, it can never become the show.
The exact details of Punchdrunk’s next production remain a closely guarded secret, but Barrett and his colleague have left a tantalising trail of clues. What we do know: it will be in London and, if Barrett gets his way, it will be on a grander scale than ever before. It will also further break down the barriers between what is real and what is performed – between audience and actor. Expect a mix of cleverly-hidden technology and video game mechanics. Don’t expect masks and interpretive dance. But, most of all, expect to be surprised.
“If The Oracles works in this round of testing we’ll scale it for the next London show. Conceivably, if it works, we want to get this out to as wide an audience as possible,” Barrett says. “It’s a completely different tool kit. It’s things we hypothesised about before the tech was available that you are now able to do.” He asks a colleague if he is able to show me a project Punchdrunk is working on at the moment and is met with a stern shake of the head. He asks again and is told no again. There’s an affable, childish stubbornness to Barrett’s ambition. “Within Fallow Cross, the questions we’re asking are probably at least six major shows. So let’s say six years, one a year. But I think we are hungry to have a new period in our lifespan where we are actually just making work,” he says, pausing briefly to think. “We retreated.” If Punchdrunk is to continue to define immersive theatre, that retreat has to come to an end.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
