Viola’s Room

Punchdrunk are back! A phrase that feels less momentous this time than last time as it’s barely been six months since the immersive theatre leading lights’ previous show ‘The Burnt City’ wrapped up, as opposed to the seven year gap between that and predecessor ‘The Drowned Man’.

‘Viola’s Room’ is momentous in its own way, though. It’s the company’s first major show to not require the wearing of masks, a long term hallmark that Punchdrunk have apparently now ditched (though previous mask shows will likely be revived). It’s also smaller in scale than anything the company has done for years: once it starts properly it’s just 45 minutes long, for a maximum audience of six people (though there are numerous performances throughout the day), with no live actors. 

I say that it’s smaller: ‘Viola’s Room’ is so disorientating that it’s impossible to really say what size space it takes place in. A few tightly-wound square metres? The whole of the company’s vast Carriageworks base? Could be either.

‘Viola’s Room’ is a show based upon Barry Pain’s dark 1901 short story ‘The Moon Slave’. Directed by Punchdrunk boss Felix Barrett, it has an actual text – a true rarity for the company – which has been adapted by Booker Prize-shortlisted Brit novelist Daisy Johnson and recorded by one Helena Bonham-Carter, whose half-whispered reading is played back to us in the headphones we don at the start of the show (the same time as we’re required to put our shoes and socks away into boxes, though there are apparently options if you don’t feel comfortable with this).

Viola, we learn, is a princess-to-be whose parents died mysteriously in her youth. On the occasion of her engagement to the nice but boring king, she slips away to an ancient maze on the palace grounds, where she pledges her soul away to the moon, thus causing her to become increasingly detached from the real world, living only through frenzied all night dancing.

She also appears to be a millennial teenager: the show begins in her very ‘90s-looking bedroom, where alt-rock classics by Smashing Pumpkins and Tori Amos provide a soundtrack.

It’s a gentle start: eventually entering a white-draped but very dark labyrinth, we’re instructed to follow the light at all times, typically in the form of gauzy, will-o'-the-wisp type orbs suspended from the ceiling.

The show literally starts small, with the tale being illustrated by designer Casey Jay Andrews’s gothicky dioramas - they’re eerily beautiful, but the initial pace is slow and you can’t help but feel quite distanced from it all, like you’re looking at a very high concept museum exhibit, or taking in a very posh audiobook.

But a change happens after our second visit to Viola’s bedroom - the show becomes vastly more immersive. That‘s a word that has been so overused in recent years as to feel largely meaningless. But you can use it pretty guilt free for the latter half of ‘Viola’s Room’. Even in Punchdrunk’s classic shows, you felt relatively distanced from the situation, a spectator able to walk about the show freely but not involved in the action. 

The fact you have next to no choice about what you do or where you go in ‘Viola’s Room’ really doesn’t take anything away from it. In its most potent sections you feel as possessed as Viola herself - driven to your actions rather than merely obliged to play along. Being barefoot might seem like an odd gimmick at first, but it means you feel literally grounded in this strange world.

By its climax I felt like a character in a horror film, not least because of the tremendous soundtrack relayed by Gareth Fry’s extraordinary sound design: there is a sequence set to Massive Attack’s malevolent dub masterpiece ‘Angel’ that’s pretty much the best use of recorded music I’ve ever encountered in the theatre, and certainly the most cinematic.

As with a lot of Punchdrunk’s work, the plot isn’t the point of it exactly. The narration means the story is vastly easier to follow than that of the bulk of their shows, but it essentially amounts to an Angela Carter-ish dark fairy tale that teeters on the generic. However, it absolutely provides the correct beats for the astonishing creative team to do their work. The deeper into the labyrinth you go, the more you feel like part of the labyrinth, the less you feel like you’ll escape.

A particularly cynical line of argument might suggest that ‘The Burnt City’, ‘The Drowned Man’, ‘Sleep No More’ etcetera were all just elaborate variations on the same basic idea. ‘Viola’s Room’ is unquestionably something different. It might be short, but in those 45 minutes you’ll live a haunted lifetime.