It is this element of surprise and the detailed, highly skilled performances of the actors that make the show what it is, as you have absolutely no idea what is coming next. Where else in London are you able to look up and suddenly find a transparent plastic roof filled with water and giggling girls just inches above your head, with them sliding and slipping around in synchronised movements, creating incredibly beautiful images? Only for other performers, moments later, to leap into the audience from an elevated position and smash exploding boxes filled with glitter over the heads of audience members? As a summary of this physical expression of insanity and joy, the description of Fuerza Bruta at its London site of ‘A powerful music score, strobe lighting, nudity (moderate), water (lots), scenes of a poetic, violent and beautiful nature and a whole lot of mess’ could not be bettered. A month later and inspired to experience some more immersive theatre, I donned my beaked mask and, wearing the same pair of shoes, descended into the gloomy mystery of Temple Studios for two and a half hours of hedonistic delirium with Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man . Nothing could have prepared me for this: dozens of fractured storylines, loosely based on Buchner’s weird and murderous play Woycek , played out across five floors of a huge old Post Office. There was a car, multiple bars, a wedding, a funeral, a trailer park, a cinema, cafés, houses, a church, and even a desert across the whole of the top floor. I was complicit in the narratives of the characters I met, who dragged me along darkened corridors to beautiful and intricately “...I was being dragged down a pitch-black corridor by a character who I hadn’t seen before. Travelling at break-neck speed, I found myself suddenly wide-eyed and terrified in the bright beam of a torch being held by a doctor.”
detailed locations within the show’s narrative. In one particularly memorable moment early on, I was being dragged down a pitch-black corridor by a character who I hadn’t seen before. Travelling at break-neck speed, I found myself suddenly wide- eyed and terrified in the bright beam of a torch being held by a doctor. We paused; I looked at the members of the other group who were following him for a moment, and then we were on our way again. It is this kind of seemingly chance encounter (clearly highly choreographed) that assaults the senses on every level. I won’t forget the smell of the trailer park, with its gasoline and wood chips and Nancy Sinatra’s voice lamenting lost loves. Felix Barrett’s Punchdrunk takes the notion of bespoke, tailored and daring theatre explored by Fuerza Bruta, to a whole new level, and one which has reconfigured my conceptions of theatre permanently. As I finally sat down after hours on my feet on the
tube journey home, I removed one of my shoes to empty out a small pile of sand onto the floor… perhaps I need a new pair.
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