The Masque of the Red Death 4

Red Death IV

On the way to Red Death 3, I was worried about how much more there was for me, whether there would be too much repetition, whether I could face all that traipsing up and down.

Well how much amplified were these feelings on my fourth trek to Battersea, after the extraordinary experience of Red Death 3, probably as full a Punchdrunk experience as it possible to have. And I had had a full on PT session in the afternoon, so I was feeling pretty knackered.

Well I guess the thing about Punchdrunk is that it just never stops surprising you. True I was feeling a bit crowdaphobic and spend as much time as possible lurking in the shadows, mostly in the cellars. And also true that there seemed to be a lot of downtime searching for things to happen. But the scenes I caught were as incredible as ever.

Befitting a man who has just had two gruelling sessions at the dentist, I kept finding myself in the Berenice storyline, about a man obsessed with his new wife’s teeth, so much so that he kills her and extracts them. I had seen the wedding /death dance on the bed before, but it made much more sense to me now as part of the story line and the dancing seemd more dramatic. I caught (twice) the scene were Berenice is carried into the dungeons for further extraction work before being buried alive, follwed by her wonderful resurrection from her subterranean pit.

I spent some time following Ligeia - I think it was her because of a lovely three-partner dance, which I think represented her haunting return to her husband by possessing the body of his dead second wife. Following Ligeia alone in the basement, she turned on me and started to throttle me with the cord of my cape (I thought they were meant to keep you safe) before sniffing my neck and telling me that she recognised my scent, knew it was me before I walked in the room, would carry my scent with her on her journey. It’s Decleor I thought. Good job I had shaved. She also said she could feel my heart beating, which she may have literally been able to do since it was beating so much from her initial attack. Hopefully that’s all she could feel.

I finally found Pluto, the BAC’s black cat, basking by a fire – one time when I popped in it was crouched on the top of one of the armchairs, backlit by the fire, sharp green eyes blazing at me.

Also caught the end of the murder scene in the attic, as the narrator of the Tell Tale Heart wrapped up the body; found her later in the bar still clutching the heart she had removed.

I only caught one of the in-show specials – the Kneehigh Theatre who made a wonderful presentation based on Poe’s poem Annabel Lee. It was staged in a black room, the walls scribbled on with chalk; in the centre was a small beach with candles surrounded by buckets stuffed with sand and the clothes and shoes of the dead Ms Lee. In the corner a troubadour strummed a banjo (I think) and sang the poem. On the beach a man pulled the artefacts from the buckets and laid them out to suggest the body of the deceased, occasionally writing manically on the walls, things like "today I believe in ghosts", before lying down besides the body as the poet does in the poem. He then ripped out his heart, superbly rendered in the form of a rose attached to red streamers - in the violence of the act, the streamers took on a visceral, liquid form. This was superb theatre, the ability to conjure up the sense of a beach and the sea, of a body and a distraught lover, from minimal ingredients in a tiny black space. My only quibble was that the distraught lover was wearing a hoody and jeans, but at the same time it gave the piece a contemporary feel.

The Prospero’s Ball finale was as wonderful as ever, although I sensed that the cast were getting pretty knackered. Some were looking particularly gaunt, and most of the leading ladies were sporting bruises and (non-costume) bandages. All of which of course only made them look more like characters in a Poe story. If the show does my head in so consistently, I can’t begin to imagine what it must do to the cast, physically and mentally. And the run extended til mid April. God help them!

So I had another amazing time. This visit seemed to offer the strongest sense of narrative, and to be the most Poe like. There was a lot more death, a corpsly rather than spectral feel.

Despite it not being as full an experience as the last visit, it was as intense in its own way. I left exhilarated, with a sense of completeness. Not that I had by now seen everything there was to see, but that I had seen most things, or at least had caught as much as it was reasonable to expect. That I had reached a point of diminishing returns.

But I also learnt the joy of repetition. Seeing Berenice married, killed and resurrected twice in one evening, connecting it to the fragments of the same story seen on previous occasions, developing a theme of the inevitability of tragedy, of the endless repetition and recycling of stories that make up narrative art, maybe even suggesting Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence.

From wikipedia…

"Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in the exact same self-similar form an incomprehensible and unfathomable number of times"

"Heinrich Heine wrote the following passage which is said to have been where Friedrich Nietzsche first encountered the idea:

For time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies are finite.... Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.... And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me, and a woman will be born, just like Mary."


Will I return to the Red Death? Inevitably!