Punchdrunk - The Masque of the Red Death

My first of four (count ‘em) scheduled visits to the Battersea Arts Centre (and you know how nervous I get going south of the river).

It might seem an odd thing to say about a Punchdrunk performance, but this was a remarkably subtle production, by which I mean that its genius crept up on me slowly; only after a bad night’s sleep and by gathering my thoughts for the blog did I come to realise quite what a thing this thing was.

It is not as immediate as Faust, as visceral and thrilling. I didn’t mean to compare it to Faust, but when you enter a Punchdrunk world, you lose any control over your mind and senses (any one who says the experience of Punchdrunk theatre is democratic, that the individual audience member “chooses” what to see, gets it so wrong - one can no-more choose than one can stop one own’s heart from beating or lungs from breathing - all you can do is go with the flow, accept that you have lost control over your own body, brain, senses and all).

So for a lot of the show I was in compare and contrast mode. The show made be do this, by too often not being different enough from Faust – the smell of mothballs, the rumpled beds, the dances in confined spaces, the feather-light whispered dialogue, the shouty dialogue, the meaningful slapping and posturing of rugged bearded men, the imperilled beautiful women, the big set pieces – but without ever managing to be quite as thrilling as Faust – there was nothing here (that I saw) to match the scenes in the Diner, in the end Bar, in the Pine Forest, and in the Basement at Wapping. It also lacked the demonic energy of Faust, and I missed the changes in tempo offered by the mid-show Hop and Mephistopheles' conjuring tricks. There seemed to be a lot of similar scenes – for example at least three man/woman physical theatre/dance erotic/violent routines in tiny bedrooms, a saminess of atmosphere through the piece.

Where The Masque of the Red Death excelled was with scenes which felt completely fresh – the woman playing the piano becoming tormented by a ghostly echo, and the fabulous Palais Royale Music Hall, especially walking through the changing rooms to view the acts from the wings – not just a play within a play but a sense (an illusion) that the play within the play was more real than the play, watching the person manning the curtains flying up into the air to use their weight to pull the rope down, watching the actress pacing nervously and muttering to herself before going on stage, acting not being an actor in other words, a symbol of the swirling realities and psychological inversions to come if you spend too long in here…

Let’s being again at the beginning. I don my mask and think how happy I am to be back in the world of Punchdrunk. It’s like a drug of course, altered states, addictive. I quickly find the outfitter and don my cape. A large man with Victorian moustache whispers in my ear, do I ever wonder why nothing happens when you die? In a small room with framed butterflies on the walls I find a weeping woman – “all is lost" she wails. She is dipping her hand in a bowl of water, her wet hand holds mine and leads me down to a parade of the character up the main staircase. I am alone in a room with a man and wife, petting and stroking alternates with horrific abuse, she is slapped around, made to drink from a bowl like a cat, then hung up from the roof, hanging like a limp rag doll. Thereafter things get blurry. Different rooms, different scenes, a constant sense of imminent sex and violence. Mr Usher seems to be everywhere. Women in peril slink behind doorways. Screaming and anguished cries coming from somewhere unidentifiable.

No stories as such emerge from these fragmented shards, little pieces of Poe, sampled and remixed into something different. Yet something, a theme rather than a narrative, congeals, a consistency of deadly sins, lust and avarice, drinking and gambling and debauchery. The saminess starts to feel less like a weakness and more like something musical, the way classical music uses repeating refrains and sonic motifs, variations, resonances.

And all these doors and rooms and curtained tunnels, following an actress under and through a fireplace into a small curtained area where, for some time, we are all compressed, too close, but not close enough. Something, an idea, starts to niggle away at me. At first I think the whole experience is (metaphorically) sexual, squeezing yourself through these red corridors and into tiny spaces, the whole production reeks of sex. But overnight another idea comes, it stems from that extraordinary experience of being backstage at the Palais Royale, what it reminds me of, what it feels like, is not so much parallel universes, but rather like being able to travel down portals into different people’s minds – it makes me think of the troposphere in Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mr Y” or the portals into John Malkovich’s mind in “Being John Malcovich”. This is an experience about consciousness, about what it feels like to be in someone else’s mind, and of course, what flows from that, is that the overreaching theme is madness. Many of the
Poe stories on which the piece is based depict madness of some sort, but “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" becomes central. We see it in one of the big set pieces, about a dozen cast members around a dinner table, things becoming increasingly strange and out of control. In the Poe story, a narrator visits a lunatic asylum and dines with the doctors. As the story progresses, we learn that they are not the doctors, but the patients, who have revolted and taken over the asylum, the sane made mad and the mad made sane. And this becomes the central metaphor for my experience. It is an insane experience. In everything you see and do, the delicate membrane between sane and insane seems to have torn. Including your own grasp on reality. In the mask, in this atmosphere, your own sense of self dissolves. How else to explain why, in the bar at the Palais Royal, I order a shot of tequila. I never ever drink shots. I might have a tot of whisky at home, but I haven’t had tequila for at least 10 years. As I said at the beginning, any sense of choice is an illusion. You go mad, you are possessed. This is insane.

I go back in a couple of weeks.