I don’t think there are many words that can describe Punchdrunk’s latest immersive experience ‘The Drowned Man’. Beautiful. Scary. Intimate. Awe-inspiring…perhaps.
A sprawling abandoned building in Paddington is the set for this most intricate of stories. Inside there are 34 characters, who move (well, dance/run/fight/crawl) their way through the 100 rooms and 4 storeys that make up the Hollywood film set world of Temple Studios, and the LA suburbs that surround it. The characters perform in their own individual story loops (shown twice during each 3 hour viewing), moving around the building and interacting with each other as they meet. Much is performed using movement and super intense eye acting (speech is kept to a minimum), and, unless you are lucky enough to be chosen for a 1:1, the audience is largely ignored.
As soon as you arrive, you are greeted by the studio porter, given a creepy mask, and told it must remain on for the entire performance. The Porter then encourages you to split up and “take your own path”. If you go in a group, I’d definitely suggest taking this advice. The Drunken Man story is huge, and impossible to take in alone – Punchdrunk says that on average an individual will only see around 30% of the entire story during one viewing – so coming together after the finale and sharing your different experiences really will help you to understand the bigger picture.
The Porter takes the group into a lift, and then randomly throws people out onto different floors. What happens next is completely up to you. You could choose to find a character and follow them (make sure you keep up), or explore the different worlds alone, at your own pace. Before going, I read about how many secret rooms and special ‘clues’ were hidden throughout the venue, so for the first hour I hurtled between the floors, through a forest and a beach and a film set and a bar and a costume department and a caravan park and a doctor’s surgery and a whole host of other things, trying to find something special. Other reviews will encourage you to take time to explore the sets, and whilst they really are incredible, I personally don’t think there’s a huge amount of insight to be gained from them. Finding secrets without a cast member is hard, and whilst the huge amount of detailing that goes into the letters and diary entries and all sorts of other things across the set is amazing, it makes no sense without context. Exploring is a lonely experience and, in fact…a little bit boring.
My evening turned up a notch when I started to follow one of the characters Frankie, who raced (literally – I ran up and down so many flights of stairs) us through fights and dances and orgies and mental breakdowns and SO much more. Frankie is a new to Temple Studios, as spends much of his time trying to impress (and being used by) the film sets’ old timers. As the pressure and emotion builds, he slowly begins to lose his mind, pulling the audience members that managed to keep up with him through a number of dramatic scenes before finally breaking down at the end of his loop. Frankie is a great character to follow – I’d definitely recommend him to a first timer.
On many occasions, a character performed for a group, before holding their hand out to one person and pulling them away for a one-on-one performance. I was lucky enough to have this happen to me right at the end of the night, when a character called Andy dragged me running through the building to the very front of the finale scene (if this happens to you, be prepared for some REALLY sweaty hugging as you watch the scene) before whisking me off again to a hidden room, where he de-masked me and asked if we could slow dance. This was incredibly intimate and a bit odd, but amazing at the same time. If are lucky enough to be chosen by a character for a one-on-one, go with them – don’t hold back. Not many people get this opportunity, and the chance to have one of these amazing cast members perform just for you really is a rare and special thing.
After 3 hours of being thrown around the most complex of stories by the Punchdrunk cast, I found the rest of my group and we sat down to try and figure out what the hell just happened. One of us saw someone murdered, another walked in on a witch doctor performing a funeral, and another one us asked was asked to climb into a character’s bed and was read a story. Between us we had also seen an orgy, watched a crazy doctor inject people and force fed them peas, found a cinema room, sat as the actors performed ‘film scenes’ on the Temple Studio sets, did shots with a character in the bar and saw someone get hit by a car.
This is a performance that really stays with you… 12 hours on and I’m still getting flashbacks, and trying to figure out the meaning behind everything I saw. The Drowing Man is confusing and huge, but incredibly enchanting. More than anything, I really really really want to go back. Punchdrunk…I’m not done with you yet.
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