Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City (London)
Oct. 13th, 2023 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraIn the smouldering promise of the fall of Troy, a mythical world of gods and mortals rises from the ashes.
As Greece teeters on the brink of victory, the neon backstreets of Downtown Troy give way to a sprawling labyrinth hiding secrets even the prophecies could not foretell.
In this colossal playground, the furies watch on as mortals play out their fate.
And as night falls, the city comes alive.
One last time.
Immersive, interactive theatre; overwhelming and mesmerising all at once. I went to the second-to-last performance and otherwise I would have rebooked immediately.
Anyway. It’s three hours long and takes place in two massive warehouses in Woolwich. One, Mycenae, is a sparse open environment, torn by war, with a few large girders left precariously in the centre; there is a a mezzanine floor for the palace and around the edges of the lower level are white drapes, dividing the space up into any number of smaller, transient, rooms. Much of the floor is sand. It feels old. In contrast, Troy is a maze of rooms (shops, bars, offices…), doors and stairways, with one largish town square that I kept losing and finding again in unexpected directions; it has neon signs and is generally more modern.
In between both is the bar, Peep, where you initially enter and where you can return at any time during the performance; the actors may arrive as well, to drink or take over the stage from the regular performers (Orpheus and the Furies, naturally).
I’d upgraded my ticket to VIP in a fit of profligacy when I bought it several months ago, which got me a separate faster entrance, free cloakroom, a private room in the bar, and a cup of kykeon (sake sour in a metal cup, cold and herbal). There were about a dozen VIPs; the guy I talked to was coming to see his cousin for the first time, having had his original booking cancelled two weeks earlier when the heatwave made it impossible to perform. He hadn’t seen her in person since she was a child and couldn’t remember her character name, but did tell me she was the only character who didn’t loop, a piece of useful if not entirely accurate information that I was subsequently grateful for.
Everyone entering the play was given a white plastic bauta mask, covering the upper face; only the actors were bare-faced. Non VIPs booked time slots symbolised by playing cards and were called in by those (“Red twos. All red twos…”). We were taken in separately, by a woman who introduced herself as Judith Kore and gave us each a heavy metal coin, a maze on one side and a horse on the other. She took us into a museum exhibition, with glass cases containing various relics, and told us some of the stories behind them, particularly that of Persephone, who, she informed us, was also known as Kore; halfway through her description of one case, there was a crashing sound, the lights strobed wildly and went out. Our guide took us by torchlight to a tunnel, with sand on the floor and a single flower growing out of it. She crouched down next to the flower, talking to it in tones of regret, and gestured for us to continue. At the end of the tunnel, a cloaked figure held out a silver platter for our coins, and we were admitted to Mycenae.
There is very little spoken dialogue in The Burnt City. There is music, all the time, building and falling and repeating, with no visible source and no variation in sound levels. The theatre is physical. There are no labels for who anyone is, and while in Mycenae, which is based on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, I knew most of the characters & events (my high school drama production was The Golden Masque of Agamemnon; I was crew and operated the Pythoness), the Troy side is based on Euripides’ Hecuba, which I am much less familiar with and so when I first arrived there I had no idea whose eyeballs were being yanked out. I spent a lot of time convinced I was missing out on things and of course I was; that’s part of the experience. I did not get any 1:1s or walkouts. It was still incredible.
Anyway. In Mycenae, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra were descending from the mezzanine, and Iphigenia, ready for her wedding (to, I think Neoptolemus? The two warriors were a bit indistinguishable) was waiting at the tip of one of the girders. A woman walked past holding a bowl of candles, and I followed her out through the draperies and eventually into an open area, where she put down the candles and carefully placed sticks in the sand, building some sort of ritual space. There were screams and wails from the main area; eventually the woman (I think, on looking at the cast list, that she was the Oracle) hurried away, and Artemis (a tall, strong, and incredibly compelling woman; at one point she lifted up a stag’s skull and danced with it as her second face) came in, holding the bloodied body of Iphigenia. She put Iphigenia down and then, slowly, gracefully and inexorably, danced her back into life. Iphigenia, now in a red dress, departed, bent on vengeance.
I picked my way back through the rooms, looking at the trinkets and notebooks around - there are lots of things that felt like they meant something, or would if I had more context, and then joined the main loop again up on the mezzanine, where Agamemnon had returned triumphantly from Troy to be met by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, who was wearing an extremely unnerving full head mask, bald but with feminine features. Clytemnestra convinced Agamemnon to have a massage from Aegisthus, equal parts eroticism and barely-contained violence; eventually she joined them both. After, Agamemnon showers at the end of the mezzanine, beckoning Clytemnestra to join him; eventually he realises Aegisthus has peeled his mask off and is watching them both. Before Agamemnon can react Clytemnestra kills him, leaving his body for Iphigenia’s spirit to find; the loop begins again.
From up on the mezzanine I could see Iphigenia in her bedroom, excitedly getting ready for her wedding, and then watch as she stood expectantly on the girder only for Neoptolemus to leave and her father edge towards her with a knife. I could see Artemis as well, over in another area; she and Iphigenia screamed at the exact same moment.
I went down to follow Neoptolemus and found instead the entrance to Troy, which I’d completely missed on my previous explorations. I had been absently wondering why the space wasn’t quite as big as I’d thought. Troy was back streets and shops, multilevelled and confusing; I ended up in a lavish upstairs bedroom where a man was decorated with golden jewellery and whipped with a string of pearls; I lost him for a while, finding instead a town hall, a bar, a florist’s (only fake flowers) and a man parkouring above the alleyways in controlled and dangerous precision, and went back up where I was somehow on the outside of a glass wall into a nightclub full of frenzied, anguished dancers, and then inside the nightclub where the man from the bedroom scrabbled frantically across the floor, his eyes clawed out. He ended up against some sort of altar; the woman who’d guided us into the play came in and washed his face.
She had a clump of dedicated followers and I attached myself to them (it is really odd being part of a moving audience, semi-invisible behind your mask, but it was startling how quickly I got used to it). In the bar, she’d told the man I’d spoken to that a friend would be waiting for him inside; he’d said that he thought she was his cousin, and she’d demurred and said that she was flattered by the comparison. Obviously she was his cousin; she didn’t loop (or, rather, had one single loop through the whole play), and I spent much of the rest of the play following her and getting increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t work out who she was, which was entirely my own fault because initially I thought she was Cassandra but I couldn't make it work. She found a small plant and took it with her into a greenhouse, where a man traded with her for a larger version of the plant - the show looped again, then (I think), and she stuttered, the whole greenhouse shaking and lights flashing.
As she walks back, another man beckons her in for a palm reading, his radio playing her own voice as she has a conversation with herself (I only worked out it was her, afterwards, by reading online, but the palm reading was still eerie, David Lynch-like with the voices not quite matching and a lifeline that tells her she is already dead. She is Persephone; she starts the play with no memories, and regains them as she goes.
I followed her through the streets of Troy, and she alone of all the actors looked at the audiences as we followed her, identically masked, and asked us if we could see her. She finds the bar inside Troy, where the barman denies all knowledge of her, and then takes the route out of Troy and into Peep, where she takes the stage and recites Leonard Cohen’s If I Didn’t Have Your Love (“If the sun would lose its light/And we lived an endless night”), unnerved and distressed by how she knows exactly what will happen. Back to Troy, and into an office, where a grimly smiling man in gold locks the doors, pulls down the blinds, waves his hand for the audience to sit down, and plays a silent game of chequers with an increasingly agitated Persephone. Eventually she rises to her feet and screams at him, soundless, her face distorting as he rolls on the floor in agony; the whole scene reminded me strongly of the Kit Williams painting in Masquerade where the moon screams - hyperrealistic action, stylised and freighted with meaning.
The man (Hades; he also doesn't loop) takes Persephone out of the office and towards another locked door, handing her the keys and telling her he will show her everything. Persephone took half a dozen other audience members through with her and locked it behind her.
I’d lost touch with the main story of the mortals in Troy, and caught it only in glimpses - a body hung by its ankles in the square, bloodied men stumbling through the streets, the shopkeepers determinedly uninvolved. Someone drew in chalk on a wall and then hastily rubbed it out. I never managed to work out who Apollo was. With about ten minutes to go I went back to Mycenae, where the action and music were building to a climax, with Hades and Persephone reconciled & watching from the mezzanine. According to a very intellectual review I found on line the remaining actors are enacting Dirk Bout’s painting The Fall of the Damned, a copy of which hangs on the wall in Hades’ office, trapped in an endless purgatorial cycle of death and rebirth. I did not know that but it certainly looked like a painting or a masque, beautiful, moving, and disturbing; so much damage, so little resolution. The music finishes; the actors disperse.
I felt a little stunned on my way out. I collected my coat and took a boat back to Greenwich, my head crowded with images. I wish I could see it again, with more knowledge, but I’m glad I didn’t read too much in advance and get myself knotted up over trying to be everywhere at exactly the right time. I hope they do something else with the space - there is already a teaser, a hint at another side to come - and I hope I’ll be able to see it, somehow.
As Greece teeters on the brink of victory, the neon backstreets of Downtown Troy give way to a sprawling labyrinth hiding secrets even the prophecies could not foretell.
In this colossal playground, the furies watch on as mortals play out their fate.
And as night falls, the city comes alive.
One last time.
Immersive, interactive theatre; overwhelming and mesmerising all at once. I went to the second-to-last performance and otherwise I would have rebooked immediately.
Anyway. It’s three hours long and takes place in two massive warehouses in Woolwich. One, Mycenae, is a sparse open environment, torn by war, with a few large girders left precariously in the centre; there is a a mezzanine floor for the palace and around the edges of the lower level are white drapes, dividing the space up into any number of smaller, transient, rooms. Much of the floor is sand. It feels old. In contrast, Troy is a maze of rooms (shops, bars, offices…), doors and stairways, with one largish town square that I kept losing and finding again in unexpected directions; it has neon signs and is generally more modern.
In between both is the bar, Peep, where you initially enter and where you can return at any time during the performance; the actors may arrive as well, to drink or take over the stage from the regular performers (Orpheus and the Furies, naturally).
I’d upgraded my ticket to VIP in a fit of profligacy when I bought it several months ago, which got me a separate faster entrance, free cloakroom, a private room in the bar, and a cup of kykeon (sake sour in a metal cup, cold and herbal). There were about a dozen VIPs; the guy I talked to was coming to see his cousin for the first time, having had his original booking cancelled two weeks earlier when the heatwave made it impossible to perform. He hadn’t seen her in person since she was a child and couldn’t remember her character name, but did tell me she was the only character who didn’t loop, a piece of useful if not entirely accurate information that I was subsequently grateful for.
Everyone entering the play was given a white plastic bauta mask, covering the upper face; only the actors were bare-faced. Non VIPs booked time slots symbolised by playing cards and were called in by those (“Red twos. All red twos…”). We were taken in separately, by a woman who introduced herself as Judith Kore and gave us each a heavy metal coin, a maze on one side and a horse on the other. She took us into a museum exhibition, with glass cases containing various relics, and told us some of the stories behind them, particularly that of Persephone, who, she informed us, was also known as Kore; halfway through her description of one case, there was a crashing sound, the lights strobed wildly and went out. Our guide took us by torchlight to a tunnel, with sand on the floor and a single flower growing out of it. She crouched down next to the flower, talking to it in tones of regret, and gestured for us to continue. At the end of the tunnel, a cloaked figure held out a silver platter for our coins, and we were admitted to Mycenae.
There is very little spoken dialogue in The Burnt City. There is music, all the time, building and falling and repeating, with no visible source and no variation in sound levels. The theatre is physical. There are no labels for who anyone is, and while in Mycenae, which is based on Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, I knew most of the characters & events (my high school drama production was The Golden Masque of Agamemnon; I was crew and operated the Pythoness), the Troy side is based on Euripides’ Hecuba, which I am much less familiar with and so when I first arrived there I had no idea whose eyeballs were being yanked out. I spent a lot of time convinced I was missing out on things and of course I was; that’s part of the experience. I did not get any 1:1s or walkouts. It was still incredible.
Anyway. In Mycenae, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra were descending from the mezzanine, and Iphigenia, ready for her wedding (to, I think Neoptolemus? The two warriors were a bit indistinguishable) was waiting at the tip of one of the girders. A woman walked past holding a bowl of candles, and I followed her out through the draperies and eventually into an open area, where she put down the candles and carefully placed sticks in the sand, building some sort of ritual space. There were screams and wails from the main area; eventually the woman (I think, on looking at the cast list, that she was the Oracle) hurried away, and Artemis (a tall, strong, and incredibly compelling woman; at one point she lifted up a stag’s skull and danced with it as her second face) came in, holding the bloodied body of Iphigenia. She put Iphigenia down and then, slowly, gracefully and inexorably, danced her back into life. Iphigenia, now in a red dress, departed, bent on vengeance.
I picked my way back through the rooms, looking at the trinkets and notebooks around - there are lots of things that felt like they meant something, or would if I had more context, and then joined the main loop again up on the mezzanine, where Agamemnon had returned triumphantly from Troy to be met by Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, who was wearing an extremely unnerving full head mask, bald but with feminine features. Clytemnestra convinced Agamemnon to have a massage from Aegisthus, equal parts eroticism and barely-contained violence; eventually she joined them both. After, Agamemnon showers at the end of the mezzanine, beckoning Clytemnestra to join him; eventually he realises Aegisthus has peeled his mask off and is watching them both. Before Agamemnon can react Clytemnestra kills him, leaving his body for Iphigenia’s spirit to find; the loop begins again.
From up on the mezzanine I could see Iphigenia in her bedroom, excitedly getting ready for her wedding, and then watch as she stood expectantly on the girder only for Neoptolemus to leave and her father edge towards her with a knife. I could see Artemis as well, over in another area; she and Iphigenia screamed at the exact same moment.
I went down to follow Neoptolemus and found instead the entrance to Troy, which I’d completely missed on my previous explorations. I had been absently wondering why the space wasn’t quite as big as I’d thought. Troy was back streets and shops, multilevelled and confusing; I ended up in a lavish upstairs bedroom where a man was decorated with golden jewellery and whipped with a string of pearls; I lost him for a while, finding instead a town hall, a bar, a florist’s (only fake flowers) and a man parkouring above the alleyways in controlled and dangerous precision, and went back up where I was somehow on the outside of a glass wall into a nightclub full of frenzied, anguished dancers, and then inside the nightclub where the man from the bedroom scrabbled frantically across the floor, his eyes clawed out. He ended up against some sort of altar; the woman who’d guided us into the play came in and washed his face.
She had a clump of dedicated followers and I attached myself to them (it is really odd being part of a moving audience, semi-invisible behind your mask, but it was startling how quickly I got used to it). In the bar, she’d told the man I’d spoken to that a friend would be waiting for him inside; he’d said that he thought she was his cousin, and she’d demurred and said that she was flattered by the comparison. Obviously she was his cousin; she didn’t loop (or, rather, had one single loop through the whole play), and I spent much of the rest of the play following her and getting increasingly frustrated that I couldn’t work out who she was, which was entirely my own fault because initially I thought she was Cassandra but I couldn't make it work. She found a small plant and took it with her into a greenhouse, where a man traded with her for a larger version of the plant - the show looped again, then (I think), and she stuttered, the whole greenhouse shaking and lights flashing.
As she walks back, another man beckons her in for a palm reading, his radio playing her own voice as she has a conversation with herself (I only worked out it was her, afterwards, by reading online, but the palm reading was still eerie, David Lynch-like with the voices not quite matching and a lifeline that tells her she is already dead. She is Persephone; she starts the play with no memories, and regains them as she goes.
I followed her through the streets of Troy, and she alone of all the actors looked at the audiences as we followed her, identically masked, and asked us if we could see her. She finds the bar inside Troy, where the barman denies all knowledge of her, and then takes the route out of Troy and into Peep, where she takes the stage and recites Leonard Cohen’s If I Didn’t Have Your Love (“If the sun would lose its light/And we lived an endless night”), unnerved and distressed by how she knows exactly what will happen. Back to Troy, and into an office, where a grimly smiling man in gold locks the doors, pulls down the blinds, waves his hand for the audience to sit down, and plays a silent game of chequers with an increasingly agitated Persephone. Eventually she rises to her feet and screams at him, soundless, her face distorting as he rolls on the floor in agony; the whole scene reminded me strongly of the Kit Williams painting in Masquerade where the moon screams - hyperrealistic action, stylised and freighted with meaning.
The man (Hades; he also doesn't loop) takes Persephone out of the office and towards another locked door, handing her the keys and telling her he will show her everything. Persephone took half a dozen other audience members through with her and locked it behind her.
I’d lost touch with the main story of the mortals in Troy, and caught it only in glimpses - a body hung by its ankles in the square, bloodied men stumbling through the streets, the shopkeepers determinedly uninvolved. Someone drew in chalk on a wall and then hastily rubbed it out. I never managed to work out who Apollo was. With about ten minutes to go I went back to Mycenae, where the action and music were building to a climax, with Hades and Persephone reconciled & watching from the mezzanine. According to a very intellectual review I found on line the remaining actors are enacting Dirk Bout’s painting The Fall of the Damned, a copy of which hangs on the wall in Hades’ office, trapped in an endless purgatorial cycle of death and rebirth. I did not know that but it certainly looked like a painting or a masque, beautiful, moving, and disturbing; so much damage, so little resolution. The music finishes; the actors disperse.
I felt a little stunned on my way out. I collected my coat and took a boat back to Greenwich, my head crowded with images. I wish I could see it again, with more knowledge, but I’m glad I didn’t read too much in advance and get myself knotted up over trying to be everywhere at exactly the right time. I hope they do something else with the space - there is already a teaser, a hint at another side to come - and I hope I’ll be able to see it, somehow.
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Date: 2023-10-13 11:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-16 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-19 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-13 12:30 pm (UTC)Thank you for writing what you saw. It sounds haunting. It reminds me of some other plays I have encountered, but mostly poetry. I like the use of Persephone.
no subject
Date: 2023-10-16 12:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-13 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-10-16 12:13 pm (UTC)