![]() When we’ve devised and rehearsed the scenes, we map out the performers’ routes of travel around the space, where they’re going to be at all times, and then it’s a process of going through the building and rehearsing more and more. That’s crucial, because there are so many distractions for an audience once they come inside the building. We devise in a way that if scenes were to be performed on a stage they would still stand up on their own account. We want an audience to feel that what they are seeing is happening for the first time, just for them in that moment. Everything Punchdrunk does is rehearsed nothing is improvised, although it may seem as though it is when you experience it. A lot of work was done in a studio beforehand, and the performers didn’t even go inside the building until about three months into the build. We wanted to make something that would literally haunt their dreams, something they would never forget having been inside and a part of.īuilding the show in New York was quite a conventional process. Those three words from the text are meant to embody both the essence of our story, the darkness at its heart, and also the effect we aim to have on the audience. Colin Marsh came up with the title when we staged the show in London back in 2003. Some of the motifs are very similar: the paranoid obsessions and the corruption at the core of the story. Quite quickly the film noir world of light and dark, shadow and suspense, melded with Macbeth. It’s strange how ideas can come about so suddenly. I love Macbeth, the idea of historical power and how the play fuses the genres of real life and fantasy worlds, and the thought of taking Shakespeare’s play as a launching point just popped into my head. It was so passionate, it transported me to a world of intrigue and I instantly felt compelled to stage the album by turning the music into a show. I found an album of film noir soundtracks, and my mind got pulled into the world that music creates. That’s the effect we’ve aimed for in Sleep No More. ![]() Punchdrunk likes to pull the rug out from under the audience’s feet so they can truly immerse themselves in a theatrical world. When you step out of your comfort zone, your adrenaline is fueled and your brain has to work that much harder. Punchdrunk wants to put the surprise back into theater, to genuinely invite the audience to come inside the experience. The fact that we know the rules and feel so safe immediately distances us from the process of the show. It’s so completely passive and mechanical, and we’re all used to it. We go into the auditorium, hand the usher our ticket, rush down the aisle, take our seat, the house lights drop and the show begins. I love the theater, but the way we experience it can be so formulaic. Below, Barrett discusses the reasoning for this unique mode of theater and how putting it all together isn't such an unconventional process after all. Upon entering, audiences are required to wear Venetian masks that disguise their identity and, rather than sitting down and watching the action unfold on a stage, theatergoers are free to roam the intriciately designed space as they please, following the actors as they take separate routes throughout the building. For the show, Punchdrunk converted a five-story abandoned warehouse space in Chelsea into the fictional 1930s McKittrick Hotel. As the artistic director of Britain's Punchdrunk theater company, Felix Barrett is helping reinvent the way audiences experience theater with off-Broadway's Sleep No More.
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