This week, Punchdrunk opened its new theatre show, Kabeiroi. This isn’t theatre as it is commonly experienced. It is performed for an audience of just two, over six hours, in locations across central London. Just 864 tickets were allocated by raffle, at £110 a pair (and the show, stipulated the company, could only be experienced in pairs).
This is theatre as luxury product. Even critics couldn’t get a ticket. The company’s statement explained: “As spaces are extremely limited, unfortunately there will be no free tickets available for the media. Any journalist wishing to purchase a ticket will be able to enter the ballot.” The Guardian’s review was written by a “keyholder” – supporters of Punchdrunk who can pay from £30 to £5,000 a year; the top rate gets you dinner with the artistic team and “a personalised service … as you develop and nurture a close relationship with the company”. About 20% of tickets (85 pairs) went to people paying at least £250 a year.
So what is Punchdrunk? Before Kabeiroi, if you were wearing a mask that didn’t fit over your spectacles, watching a titillating (but deeply artistic) sex scene and wondering where your friends had disappeared to – perhaps it was the mysterious “premium floor”, for people who had paid even more for their tickets – you were probably at a Punchdrunk show.
The London-based company has become synonymous with a particular form of immersive theatre, where you are less of an audience member and more of a participant. Punchdrunk takes over a large building, such as an old office block, turns it into a meticulously decorated, multiroom stage set and sends theatregoers wandering through.
After much perusing of mysterious-looking bedrooms and doctors’ surgeries, thickly laden with clues (or, more likely, red herrings), you will stumble upon some characters – a party girl, a cowboy, an aristocrat. These alluring creatures may or may not lead you somewhere secret for the holy grail of a Punchdrunk show – an intimate one-on-one experience, where someone will impart something in your ear that means … well, it’s not entirely clear.
It is a formula that has made Punchdrunk vastly successful. Its 2013 show, The Drowned Man, (Büchner’s Woyzeck set in seedy Hollywood) drew crowds to a disused sorting office and featured a one-night cameo from Andrew Garfield. Sleep No More, its riff on Macbeth crossed with a Hitchcock movie, has run since 2011 in New York, drawn celebrity admirers including Kanye West and become almost as much of a tourist attraction as the neighbouring High Line.
From its roots as an avant-garde theatre company, Punchdrunk has become a brand. It has done gigs for corporations from Louis Vuitton to Sony PlayStation. Can’t get a ticket to Sleep No More? There is a bar and restaurant in the same warehouse complex, so dip into the atmosphere with a cocktail instead.
Punchdrunk’s artistic director, Felix Barrett, insists that this is all a forum for experimentation. “How do you tell a story through food? How do you have a three-course meal that has a narrative?” he rhetorically asked the Guardian’s Alexis Soloski when she asked whether the eatery was a franchise. Yet while putting on such expensive extravaganzas undoubtedly requires some hustle, it’s a fine line between doing shows for Stella Artois (two of them – The Black Diamond and The Night Chauffeur) and selling out.
It is also debatable as to whether this injection of cash has improved Punchdrunk’s work. While its 2007 show, The Masque of the Red Death, is still talked about in awed terms, and It Felt Like a Kiss, its 2009 collaboration with Adam Curtis, brought the paranoia of McCarthy-era America to unforgettable life, diminishing returns have set in.
The Duchess of Malfi (2010) added opera to the mix but shredded the narrative of Webster’s play, as musicians lugged their instruments from chapel to forest. The Drowned Man (which, to be fair, I saw in previews) was even less coherent – Punchdrunk took to handing out synopses of the plot before the show after audiences complained that it was barely comprehensible.
There is also now the whiff of familiarity. Every show seems to begin with a ponderous stroll through those immaculately realised sets, and fans have become wise to Punchdrunk’s strategies. We know to stick with one actor and follow them assiduously, or risk being marooned in a wood, or a village, or on a sand dune, while the actors writhe erotically elsewhere.
The format of Kabeiroi suggests that the company recognises that it has taken this approach as far as it can – while denying critics the chance to reflect on its new direction. While its refusal to give tickets to critics speaks to a general denigration of the media in public life, it doesn’t reflect well on Punchdrunk, which received £676,694 of Arts Council (ie taxpayers’) funding from 2012-15, and continues to get a grant.
Whether or not you buy the argument that a publicly funded organisation should be accountable to critics, shutting out reviewers takes Kabeiroi off the theatrical record, robbing the performers, playwrights and audiences of the future of the chance to find out what the work said about life in 2017. It is the second big show to deny critics the chance to review it in a matter of weeks: Hamlet, starring Tom Hiddleston, did the same. Critics may get a bad rap, but they are there to represent and serve the theatregoers who keep Punchdrunk in business. Putting obstacles in their path smacks of arrogance.
As well as corporate shows, Punchdrunk does important work in the community – for instance, last year it turned a room in a care home into a village green, giving residents with dementia what must have been a huge lift. Yet the overwhelming impression is of a once avant-garde company turning into a luxury brand. It is the theatrical equivalent of gentrification – a process that rarely leads to enhanced creativity.
