The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, Temple Studios - theatre review

Punchdrunk have returned to London, taking Buchner’s fragmentary classic Woyzeck as a starting point and drawing two parallel narratives of doomed love in and around the louche, gilded setting of a 1960s film studio
Doomed love: The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable © Alastair Muir
Alastair Muir
Fiona Mountford19 May 2014

If you've been to a Punchdrunk show before, welcome back. Baby, it's hot inside. If not, abandon all preconceptions of what theatre should be and prepare yourself for a multi-storey treat. The now transatlantically-renowned company, celebrated for its epic immersive productions in which audience members are free to wander at liberty, returns to London to take up residence in its largest ever found space, in a building next to Paddington Station. I'm not certain biggest means best for Punchdrunk – their 2006 piece Faust had more overall heft – but it’s undeniably galvanising to have them back.

What is so exiting about this company (but less so about the myriad imitators they have spawned) is the challenge they offer their spectator-participants, who are issued with regulation carnival-style masks on entry. Do you follow the bursts of action or follow the space, designed with microscopic attention to every little detail? Does narrative matter, or are you happy to let the overall experience engulf you? Synopses are handed out at the start, but it would be all too easy to spend three hours here and emerge none the wiser about what was actually going on. The glorious thing about Punchdrunk is that it really wouldn’t matter.

Co-directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle have taken Buchner’s fragmentary classic Woyzeck as a starting point and from it shaped two parallel narratives of doomed love in and around the louche, gilded setting of a 1960s film studio. The small town outside the studio lot is bleak, but the atmosphere inside, where starlets move like automata, is downright eerie. ‘Mental state at outset of filming’ is a chilling phrase repeated on all employee questionnaires.

As ever, Punchdrunk offers the destabilising sensation of being returned to Freshers’ Week, with its nagging fear that better action is constantly happening elsewhere. What I missed this time around – and it might easily be that I made the wrong route choices – was the thrilling sensation of being on one’s own in pitch darkness in an unknown place. Still, I’d never crawled through a tunnel of sand before.

Until May 18 (020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk, templestudioslondon.com)

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