Punchdrunk has been redefining the theatrical and artistic landscape for a decade now, creating a series of immersive events in a disused building in Wapping, a collection of tunnels below Waterloo Station and at London’s BAC that have taken audiences on individual, uncategorisable journeys into different places, spaces and time frames. The experiences have been jagged, jigsaw puzzle-like events, which require the audience to attempt to discern a framing narrative for themselves.
But now, in its latest collaboration, created with film-maker Adam Curtis and composer Damon Albarn, that has been commissioned by Manchester International Festival and where it is premiering in a seemingly innocuous, untenanted office building next to the Opera House, there is a centrepiece. An experimental film, made for the BBC, that in its collage of archive footage and music explores America’s emergence as a global cultural force from the late fifties - and its undermining by forces both within and without, that also embraces the arrival of HIV globally, the sponsoring of Saddam Hussein and the building of the World Trade Centre.
The experience that has been created around it seeks to immerse the spectators - who are taken into a brilliantly recreated series of increasingly spooky environments in groups of just nine people - into the world of the film. It’s as if, says Curtis, “the audience were walking through the story of the film”.
Atmosphere is all and Barrett meticulously takes us on what begins feeling like a playful ghost train journey, but ends up far more sinister, as we become implicated in a story of sinister personal surveillance and face what could be actual personal threat.
Of course, it isn’t real - but surrender to it, and you will be utterly terrified. Don’t go if you’re scared of the dark - or of chainsaws. From being on the outside looking in, we eventually become part of the show itself in what may yet be the most viscerally alarming event I’ve ever experienced live.
Production information can change over the run of the show.
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