Movable feast
Punchdrunk's latest production takes place in a cavernous building where the audience's role is to keep up with the action, writes Andrew Dickson
It's an extraordinary location for a theatre production, but Punchdrunk's latest offering, The Drowned Man, is no ordinary stage show.
The cavernous building next to London's Paddington station, a former sorting office, has been temporarily transformed to look like a full-scale Hollywood movie lot. The production, which runs from July 4 to the end of the year, is billed as the troupe's biggest and most daring yet: 200,000 square feet converted into what's tantamount to a performance playground for 600 people a night.
Masked and on their feet, audiences will be encouraged to assemble the story for themselves from clues deposited around the building: to nose down corridors, searching from space to space, following a cast of 34 as they seek the identity of a mysterious figure who meets a watery death.
Sitting inside a shabby storeroom that feels more like an interrogation cell, Punchdrunk artistic director Felix Barrett is rushing through the numbers: hundreds of crew, a hundred-plus performance spaces, three hours per night, 10 hours of continuous action if played end to end. "The budget of a small film," he says, then reconsiders. "Small-ish."
If that seems unimaginable for a piece of theatre, Punchdrunk has always flirted with the boundaries of impossibility. The London-based troupe's breakthrough piece, 2006's Faust, took audiences inside an east London tobacco warehouse filled with eerily reimagined scenes from Goethe's play.
The Masque of the Red Death, the following year, was even more uncanny, occupying the entirety of Battersea Arts Centre for an atmospheric spin on Edgar Allan Poe's short stories.