The elevator door rattles open and you step tentatively into a dimly lit maze of cardboard boxes. The door crashes shut again, so you have little option but to wend your way through the boxes, the eerie strains of a nostalgic doo-wop ballad leading you on through the darkness. Then, all of a sudden you find yourself, blinking, in the middle of a town square. The mise-en-scène and music are pure 60s Americana. Wandering through the town you pass a Rockwellian drugstore, a dressmaker’s haberdashery, a saddlery, an old-fashioned toyshop. Dozens of ghostly figures, their faces obscured behind white Venetian masks, drift past the trickling fountain in the middle of the square, each of them on their own unknowable mission. In the window of an abandoned TV repair shop, you catch sight of your own reflection and remember that, in this place, you too are a ghost.
Suddenly the square is alive with activity. Two men stumble into the scene, looking battered and bruised after some unseen tussle. You and your fellow ghosts congregate around them and watch as the man in a grubby wifebeater douses himself in the fountain. Then he stands up, dripping, and looks you straight in the eye. He looks horrified. He tries to point you out to his friend, but his friend just stares at him as if he has gone insane. The man in the vest starts ranting, pacing around and around the fountain. His friend tries in vain to calm him down, tells him to wait by the fountain, then barrels off into the drugstore – and now you are faced with a choice. Do you stay with the half-crazed man at the fountain? Or follow his friend into the drugstore?
This decision is the first of many choices you will be asked to make during a typical evening at The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, the latest show by celebrated immersive theatre company Punchdrunk. Follow William, the man at the fountain, and you will witness his descent into full-blown psychosis and, ultimately, murder. Follow his friend Andy and you will see the story of a man who can only watch, helpless, as a tragedy unfolds before his eyes. Both stories end in the stark desert sands on the edge of a vast and malevolent Hollywood film studio called Temple Pictures. They are just two of the 32 intersecting narratives Punchdrunk has concocted for your dark entertainment.
The Drowned Man is Punchdrunk’s largest show yet, spanning four storeys of a disused Royal Mail sorting office next to Paddington Station in London. Fusing Georg Büchner’s fragmentary 1837 play Woyzeck with elements taken from Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive and Nathanael West’s 1939 novel Day of the Locust, the show transports you to “a world of smoke and mirrors”, a Hollywood of the fevered imagination where starlets and studio system divas brush shoulders with cowboys, factotums and cross-dressing grocers. Masked audience members are invited to wander around this enormous complex, picking up individual characters’ stories as they please, or simply poking about in drawers and cupboards trying to decipher What It All Means.
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“I want the audience to be completely in control of their evening,” says Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk’s founder and artistic director. “If you want ‘Hardcore Forerunner of German Expressionism’, then it’s there. Or if you want to just watch the Drugstore Girl for an hour and get lost in the strange pathos of her situation, you can do, and it becomes almost like a durational artwork. Or if you just want to go see a good band and have a nice American beer, that’s totally fine.”