The Punchdrunk story
Felix Barrett, founder and artistic director, Punchdrunk
Talk us through your creative process. Everything starts with the space – until we get this, we don’t plan. The first time I go into the building, I walk around it and listen to its story. I see where it feels threatening, where it feels safe. You base the set on your core response. You’re always able to apply some narrative. For example, the warehouse felt quite claustrophobic, inducing paranoia and loss of control. It reminded me of Woyzeck. From that point onwards, we’re in show mode. How do you design the set? We work with a design team for four or five months. The Drowned Man took six months. Three of us work closely together. I come up with the big picture, the sweeping aesthetic; Livi Vaughan does the furniture and texture; and Beatrice Minns does the detail, what’s hidden inside cupboards. Then we have a vast group of people who put the set together. Are there creative tensions between the three of you? There are always creative challenges, but we have worked together for the past 10 years. We trust each other. If one person feels particularly strongly about something, then they are probably right. How do you create the story? We storyboard the scenes. We put together a character list and then look at how we can tell the arc of the narrative. We’ve found it’s a good discipline to create 12 main scenes. This makes sure it’s not too complex and means the audience will understand the story. It’s almost like building a tree – the key 12 scenes make up the spine or the skeleton. But there are 27 characters in The Drowned Man, and they collide, so we then create the branches, down to the leaves. We end up with a huge table with hundreds of scenes. Each one of the 12 scenes is five minutes long, so each story is one hour long. Why have you taken this approach to a play? It’s the opposite of the “don’t touch” approach of museums. We want to empower the audience to explore, touch and be free. We have a “decompression chamber” at the beginning, where we take the audience through a maze to forget the outside world. Real life is whittled away and then you are inside a film. A soundtrack follows your every move. There are more stories than you can see. It’s a parallel universe. We don’t make anything prescriptive. It’s a puzzle that you have to unlock. How did you first come up with the idea? I did a drama degree in Exeter and thought most theatre is so predictable, safe and passive. This is a way to make it dangerous and adrenalinefuelled. It is tactile, and that makes it a much deeper and intoxicating experience. You’re lost in it. Audiences are craving something no-one else can have. There are 600 people attending a Punchdrunk show, but everyone gets an individual experience. You’ve got stories to tell your friends that they don’t have. What advice do you have for brands trying to use your approach? It’s easy to be generic. Try to deliberately go against the grain. I always think what’s the least likely thing I would expect to happen now, and then do that. The building dictates our show, so the parameters should be your starting point. Don’t try to create something hypothetically in a white room. Brands need to know what it feels like. I’m the first audience member for one of our shows.