Showing posts with label theatre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theatre. Show all posts

Saturday 19 July 2014

The Drowned Man

Way, way back in January, one of my friends treated me to an evening out to see immersive theatre company Punchdrunk and the National Theatre's most recent offering, The Drowned Man. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Seriously. It was mind-blowingly awesome. I loved it so much I couldn't stop recommending it and took my sister and her boyfriend, and my youngest sister all to see it to make sure they didn't miss it. My youngest sister liked it so much we went back to see it again, just a few weeks before it finished its run. If it hadn't wrapped, I suspect we might have gone again. Yes it really was that good, and no, that is by far not the most times people have been.



The Drowned Man is set in a 1960s Hollywood film studio, Temple Pictures. Inside the studio where stars and starlets chase their dreams, two lovers struggle to make ends meet. Tragedy strikes when infidelity, scheming and betrayal drive them apart, leading one of them into ever increasing delusion and paranoia until eventually it ends in a horrific death. Strangely, a similar story unfolds in parallel outside the gates of the studio among the people of the town. Even more mysteriously, something happened to Temple Studios itself, which we are told was shut down overnight for an unknown reason...

Do you know Punchdrunk? They made their name through pioneering large scale immersive theatre where audience members are free to roam and interact with the sets, the story and the characters.

I'd been to an open air promenade play before (based on Lords and Ladies, the Discworld book by Sir Terry Pratchett) which was staged in a park and where the audience followed the actors around the various scenes as the story unfolded. But we were still only watching in the background. Punchdrunk's productions are truly immersive. They convert huge disused buildings into unbelievably detailed sets and you are allowed to go wherever you want as the actors enact the story around you. There's no right or wrong way to go about it, you choose what you want to do and see. Though, 'seeing' doesn't describe the complete sensation, it's more 'experiencing'. You don't just watch as a passive audience, you have to work for it by choosing what to do. Very often you have to chase after the characters (up and down stairs, through narrow corridors, across forests and deserts...) as they go about their business. You can stand right next to the actors in a fight, sit at their desks, eavesdrop on intimate conversations, read a note they've read, look through cabinets, walk into their homes, riffle through their belongings... the amazing sets, the sounds, the smells, the music, the lighting, and the actors, all catapult you into the world that the story creates. It is as if you are watching from inside the story, beside the characters. It's like a live-action computer game. There are some rules though - all audience members have to wear a mask, talking is not allowed, and you are encouraged to explore on your own. A lot of it is practically in the dark, with only strategic lighting to guide you through the huge maze of rooms and sets. The more you search, the more secrets you uncover. And if you are very brave (and very lucky), you might find yourself rewarded with a special interaction.

For The Drowned Man, four floors of an old postal sorting warehouse was converted into Temple Studios and its town. The scale and detail of the sets were just incredible. To give you an idea of the sheer size, it played host to around 40 cast and 600 audience members at full capacity, with lots of space still left over. There was a working cinema inside. Yes really! You could have gotten lost in there. Each show ran for three hours but that was still not enough to see everything. You could easily have spent it just exploring the sets and rummaging through the details. And if you decided to follow the characters, there were multiple story lines happening simultaneously all over the four floors and it was impossible to follow everything. My friend and I missed a whole floor on the first visit and even after seeing it three times I hadn't followed every character.

The story itself is inspired by Woyzeck, a fractured, unfinished play by George Buchner, about a soldier who is driven crazy by his lover's affair and ends up killing her. It also draws on ideas from other works including short story The Sandman, and novels The Day of the Locust and Something Wicked This Way Comes. To quote Punchdrunk's own description, Temple Studios is a place where '...celluloid fantasy clings to desperate realism and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world' as we '..[follow] its protagonists along the precipice between illusion and reality.'

For me, it very much gave a sense of the dark underbelly of the Hollywood dream - voyeurism, exploitation, obsession and corruption. I loved the air of menace that ran through the whole story, the allusions to the malevolent and the supernatural that played with the mind and made everyone very jumpy. I loved how, as the audience, we wandered around this world in eerie white masks as if we were ghosts - we could see the characters but they couldn't see us (or could they...?). The freedom to roam everywhere and be so close to everything completely blurred the fourth wall and, in a crazily beautiful way, brought full circle the very idea of fantasy/reality that was being played out.

I also loved that each person's experience was completely unique to them - only I saw everything the way that I saw it, even though we were all watching the same thing. And because of the story-within-a-story, multiple layered nature of the game that we were playing, we could all be seeing a different layer of the story depending on how deeply we were looking for hidden clues and trying to unravel the secrets. Oh how things clicked into place when reading spoilers afterwards.

I can't wait to see more of Punchdrunk's work. I'd first become aware of them a few years ago when they turned railway arches at Waterloo station into the setting of an immersive play for the launch of a sci-fi horror game for one of the big consoles (found out too late, didn't see it T_T). Their Sleep No More, which has located the story of Macbeth inside a 1930s hotel, is currently running in New York. Will they bring that back over to the UK? Or will their next production be something completely new? I wait with bated breath! Here is Punchdrunk's founder, the genius that is Felix Barrett, to tell you a bit more:


PS. All the scenes you see in the trailers are from the actual sets that were on location.

Sunday 20 May 2012

Globe to Globe

As part of the World Shakespeare Festival this year, the Globe theatre has been playing host to theatre companies from all over the world for their special Globe to Globe season. All 37 of Shakespeare's plays are being performed over 6 weeks, each in a different language.




I've been to see 3 of them: A Midsummer Night's Dream in Korean - it was so, so good! Really funny, with a great twist on the original plot and incorporating Korean music, costume, make-up and theatre style; Titus Andronicus in Cantonese - I didn't know this grim tale before...let's just say I don't think I'll see pies in the same way ever again; and yesterday I caught Romeo and Juliet in Brazilian Portuguese - I loved it! The folk carnival-esque costumes and decor, the circus theme, the music and the singing!

I would have loved to have actually been to see the Haka that was in the Maori Troilus and Cressida O_O




Globe to Globe goes on until 9 June, catch it if you can!

Friday 17 February 2012

Antonio Gades' Fuenteovejuna

I've wanted to go and see the annual Flamenco Festival shows at Sadler's Wells for a long time so I was really excited when I got hold of tickets for last night's performance of Fuenteovejuna by the Antonio Gades Company.




A 'folk-dance drama', it is adapted from a play about a true 15th century Andalusian peasant rebellion against a tyrannical local nobleman. The period costumes and folk dance sequences really evoked an old European farming village (I loved the wedding dance). My favourite bits though were definitely the flamenco dance and music parts. The singing! The rhythm! The lightning footwork! ~♥~

Thursday 26 January 2012

Midnight Tango

I fell in love with the Argentine tango and became a fan of Flavia Cacace and Vincent Simone on Strictly Come Dancing the very first time they went on the show to showcase the dance that they had been former world champions of.




So when I found out they were going to bring Midnight Tango, their Argentine Tango dance show to the London West End this year, I bought the tickets 3 months in advance...

I went to see the show at the weekend and it was AMAZING! A love story set in a moody Buenos Aires late-night bar, there's a live tango band, singing, and lots of passionate Argentine tango.




I absolutely loved it. They're at the Aldwych theatre for 10 weeks, then they go on a UK tour. Catch them if you can!

Thursday 23 September 2010

Warhorse

Went to see Warhorse at the New London Theatre yesterday. It is absolutely stunning. It's based on the book by Michael Morpurgo about the First World War as seen through the story of a horse called Joey who is sold to the cavalry and shipped to fight in France, and Albert, the farm boy who raised Joey and enlists in the army to look for him and bring him home.

The horses are represented on stage by incredible life size puppets that feel very real and the story of friendship and the horrors of the Great War are truly moving. The charges across the battlefields gave me goosebumps.