Synopsis This haunting version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death follows Punchdrunk's smash-hit success, Faust, which won a Critics' Circle Award in 2006. Journey into a macabre world, explore the four corners of Battersea Arts Centre and relive its Victorian origins as Punchdrunk immerses the building in Poe's imagination. The Masque of the Red Death is an indoor promenade performance lasting up to 3 hours, with two timed entries at 19:15 and 19:45. The production takes place at BAC, Lavender Hill, London SW11 5TN. Evening dress is optional. On Friday and Saturday nights tickets for The Masque of the Red Death include entry into Red Death Late Nights, an after-show party with live music and dancing.
Site-specific specialists Punchdrunk have followed last year’s award-winning production of Faust, played out across the five stories of a disused warehouse in Wapping, with a new Edgar Allan Poe-inspired installation that has transformed Battersea Arts Centre, where it opened on Tuesday 2 October 2007 (previews from 17 September) and is booking until 12 January 2008.
The Masque of the Red Death takes its title from Poe’s 1842 short story of the same name, in which a thousand nobles attend a masquerade ball in a walled abbey in an attempt to escape the plague. However, Punchdrunk’s piece is based on a collection of nine Poe stories in total, also including The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat.
On entering the installation, theatregoers, for whom evening dress is optional, are given masks to wear as they wander through BAC’s corridors for up to three hours, culminating with a cabaret in Prince Prospero’s Palace. The production is performed by a 28-strong company, directed by Felix Barrett and choreographed by Maxine Doyle.
Faust won both rave reviews as well as critical approval in the form of the Critics’ Circle Award for best design. With The Masque of the Red Death, critics were beguiled once again by the company’s ability to “totally” transform BAC into a “gothic palace of delights and surprises” as well as for the creation of such a sensual – and highly erotic – promenade experience. If there were caveats about lack of dramatic cohesion or macabre repetition, they didn’t prevent a fresh round of plaudits for the pioneering company’s new piece, which one reviewer hailed as “one of the most mind-blowingly imaginative pieces I have ever seen”.
Heather Neill on Whatsonstage.com (four stars) - “Come with me, gentle reader, into the sinister, murky world of that master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe, as re-imagined by Punchdrunk … The company has joined forces with BAC to transform the whole of its Victorian Lavender Hill headquarters, the Old Town Hall … The result is a gothic palace of delights and surprises … You venture, silently, into darkness sparsely lit by flickering candles. Soon your senses are assailed … All this is wonderful, odd, sometimes irritating, quite often incomprehensible, maddening and magical … This is either a mind-expanding experience, full of wonders, set in a glorious other world full of fantastical detail or a muddled game masquerading as art. Your response will depend on what you bring to the evening. I’m inclined to the former, and no one can deny the energy and fearlessness of the 28-strong cast under Felix Barrett’s direction.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (four stars) – “I found myself propelled on a labyrinthine journey through BAC that was simultaneously intriguing, mystifying and exhausting. Not having seen the company's famous Faust, I greatly enjoyed the experience but without feeling I had glimpsed the future of theatre. What impressed me most about Felix Barrett's direction and design was the total transformation of this former Victorian town hall into a place of gothic strangeness … But what of the dramatic action? Drawing on nine of the American fabulist's mysterious tales, it offers what you might call a theatrical Poe-pourri … I would enter only two caveats. The evening's appeal is almost entirely sensory: it leaves the heart and mind untouched. And, whereas the joy of most theatre is that one participates in a collective experience, here the stress is on individually determined journeys … But the whole event is exuberantly performed by a committed company … I still see this kind of magical mystery tour as an alternative to, rather than a substitute for, conventional drama, but, at its best, the evening eerily embodies Poe's twilit world of madness, cruelty and premature confinement.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph - “There’s something deeply disturbing going on at the old Battersea Town Hall, and my nerves are shot to shreds. The Punchdrunk company … are back to reveal yet more of their twisted dramatic imagination. They have taken over Edward Mountford’s spookily labyrinthine 1891 municipal building … and turned the whole place into a thrilling, chilling celebration of the tormented genius of Edgar Allan Poe … Because you are masked, you feel as though you have been granted a Harry Potter cloak of invisibility. There’s no embarrassment about getting up close to the performers … The whole journey proves even more addictive, the dramatic moods sharper, the choreography (by Maxine Doyle) more disturbing, while the grand finale is an absolute blast.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (three stars) – “I have never had a first-night experience like this … Parts of theatregoers that are never reached let alone touched on a normal night at the theatre were fingered last night. I was caught in the midst of Punchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death, a highly successful attempt to plunge participating audiences into the horrors of Edgar Allan Poe's plague, ghost and murder-ridden stories … The musty air was full of baleful screams, portentous music, striking clocks, maidens writhing in pain and sinister 19th-century gentlemen prowling … The climactic, liberating finale snatched us from such flamboyant melodramatics to a masked ball where Death itself collapses. Young audiences adore these London Dungeon-style theatrics but after the similarly styled Faust, the company seems caught in a brilliant gothic horror rut. Punchdrunk should use its rare, evocative gifts for some serious, epic business - Britain, say, on the verge of war in 1939 - rather than brilliantly indulging its love of the macabre.”
Paul Taylor in the Independent (five stars) – “This evening was for me a bizarre progression from embarrassment to admonishment to astonishment and then to sky-high elation … I was already in quite a dislocated mood when I arrived at the BAC for The Masque of the Red Death, which proved to be one of the most mind-blowingly imaginative pieces I have ever seen … The inspired makers of the piece have transformed the old Battersea Town Hall into a spooky, inexhaustibly intricate warren of lamp-lit interiors and cabinets of curiosities … Immersive theatre is not a new thing, but Punchdrunk take it to a level of quite vertiginous virtuosity as various stories (most of them involving madness and sex) leak into one another in elaborate, beautifully furnished domestic rooms that reek of eros and insanity … It's a show that sends its fingers rippling up the full keyboard of sexuality .. This is a piece that would have brought out the bisexual in Maria Von Trapp … The show brings to triumphant completion a certain type of site-specific theatre and starts a new experiment that leaves you trembling with anticipation.”
Sam Marlowe in The Times (four stars) – “Once engaged with the spectacle, you are quickly drawn into it … You are a guest at the ill-fated ball of the title tale, which climaxes with a wild, whirling danse macabre that ends, in an extraordinary coup de théâtre, with the startling appearance of Death himself. Masque doesn’t match Faust for sheer scale or surprise – it’s difficult, in this familiar building, to forget where you are, despite the meticulously detailed and deliciously creepy environments the company has created. And the repetitive motif of pairs of actors flinging one another about on beds in a choreographed frenzy of lust, rage, madness or terror is overused. Yet there’s nothing else in British theatre quite like a Punchdrunk show; this one unleashes whole graveyards of gleeful ghosts to make mischief in the imagination of the willing participant.”
Come with me, gentle reader, into the sinister, murky world of that master of horror, Edgar Allan Poe and his story The Masque of the Red Death, as re-imagined by Punchdrunk. The journey will not be easy as I have only words to guide you and words take something of a back seat in this enormous three-storey art installation in which dance is mixed with drama and Victorian music hall. And besides, my notes are mostly illegible because they were written in a candle-lit fog.
Punchdrunk (under the aegis of the National Theatre) had a terrific hit last year with the story of Faust played out in the wide open spaces of a Wapping warehouse. This time the company has joined forces with BAC to transform the whole of its Victorian Lavender Hill headquarters, the Old Town Hall, with the help of architect Steve Tompkins and 200 volunteers. The result is a gothic palace of delights and surprises - and one or two frights. Anyone afraid of the dark should steer well clear. (Incidentally - well done whoever managed to clear this with Health and Safety.)
You enter through a side door and don a white mask. A hostess presents you with a coin “to purchase something to keep you safe” and you venture, silently, into darkness sparsely lit by flickering candles. Soon your senses are assailed. Eerie music plays, spicy perfumes waft, a woman apparently prepares herbal medicines, a couple meet at a low Japanese table, a silent purveyor of cloaks exchanges velvet garments for the coins.
Choose your own route. Open a door and here’s a dressing room behind a music hall stage where two brothers have just come off stage and are quarrelling. In the stairwell a bride is carried away. A piano is being played in a drawing room. An erotic, violent scene takes place in a bedroom. In the cellar a middle-aged man is talking to a young woman about a murder. She produces a reticule containing a bloody heart. Elsewhere, as two men gamble, a young woman rushes in screaming. We follow her through a fireplace and stand in the pitch dark. My hand is held by the young woman muttering urgently about sickness and plague. We emerge through a wardrobe into the bedroom.
All this is wonderful, odd, sometimes irritating, quite often incomprehensible, maddening and magical. You may even spot some overlapping bits of Poe. (Anyone who prefers a clear narrative line should also steer clear.) And it’s all quite solemn.
Thank goodness for the Palais Royale. Here you can take off the hateful mask (particularly uncomfortable for anyone wearing spectacles), sit down (phew!) with a glass of wine to watch some jolly burlesque - including those squabbling siblings - and listen to the music-hall band. The evening ends with a gathering of the whole audience - if that’s the right word for be-cloaked, mask-wearing action-followers - and a final coup de theatre.
This is either a mind-expanding experience, full of wonders, set in a glorious other world full of fantastical detail (look at the draped ceilings and the hand-written notes) or a muddled game masquerading as art. Your response will depend on what you bring to the evening. I’m inclined to the former, and no one can deny the energy and fearlessness of the 28-strong cast under Felix Barrett’s direction: Maxine Doyle’s choreography frequently requires dancers to hurl themselves at the floor, the walls or each other.
This is the first of three Playground Projects at BAC (now reprieved after fears of closure) and the best compliment I can pay it is that it is exactly what a child would dream of creating, given sufficient resources and expertise. But in view of the wild imagination that has gone into everything else, couldn’t someone design a more comfortable mask?
This intelligent, intriguing performance piece will convert you to its kooky, spooky atmosphere in the best Addams-Family style.
Dressed in a plague doctor's mask and velvet cape, as an audience member you will become a bit part player, in a combination of Poe’s best known plays. Anyone who has read Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeria, or the Purloined Letter will be able to identify snippets of the writer’s work. Anyone who hasn't can still enjoy the play, although the only downfall is that there should be more dialogue or drama directly taken from Poe, as in some identifiable dialogue or play structure. As a result, the play is atmospheric and gripping but not directly recognisable - more along the lines of a generic 19th century play.
The setting is a success of beautiful yet tawdy props lurking in the darkness and festowned with cobwebs, a cross between Miss Havisham's bridal boudoir, a cobwebby masquerade ball, and a museum wrecked by looters. The performers wander from room to room so the the audience following whichever performance they choose, whether this involves a fistfight or lovescene.
One particularly effective and Blair-Witch style prop is a tiny pocketbook diary which reads: “Today I did a bad thing….” scrawled on random pages in increasingly frantic handwriting, with the rest of the diary is left blank. What evil deed was done, and what became of the writer? The clues are all here if you look hard enough...or are they?
- Nina Romain
12 Nov 07
This was undoubtedly like nothing I had ever seen or been a part of before. As an audience member you leave your pre-conceptions at the door and enter into an exquisitely enigmatic labyrinth of draped corridors and secret morbid rooms. Through exploring alone, you can easily loose yourself in the chilling and distressing tales unfolding, where even the notebook you pick up and skim read, will unleash concealed information to help fit the puzzle together. The meticulous attention to detail in the set is staggering, from unidentified body parts and ointments in glass bottles to blood-stained linen in a candle-lit attic room. This truly is a treat for the senses; distinct smells, whispers in the ear, treats placed delicately on the tongue…This promenade performance is one that excites both body and mind, and leaves you chattering with your friends to unearth the remainder of the mystery. - E.C
19 Oct 07
This was undoubtedly like nothing I had ever seen or been a part of before. As an audience member you leave your pre-conceptions at the door and enter into an exquisitely enigmatic labyrinth of draped corridors and secret morbid rooms. Through exploring alone, you can easily loose yourself in the chilling and distressing tales unfolding, where even the notebook you pick up and skim read, will unleash concealed information to help fit the puzzle together. The meticulous attention to detail in the set is staggering, from unidentified body parts and ointments in glass bottles to blood-stained linen in a candle-lit attic room. This truly is a treat for the senses; distinct smells, whispers in the ear, treats placed delicately on the tongue…This promenade performance is one that excites both body and mind, and leaves you chattering with your friends to unearth the remainder of the mystery. - E.C
19 Oct 07
I wasn't expecting to give it four stars but, like the previous reviewer, I didn't get a sense of the stories, despite reading a handful before seeing the show. Still, theatrically, it's quite amazing and the final scene (and the appearance of you-know-who) was quite astonishing. If anything spoiled it, it was the sheer number of audience members (to cover costs, or is Punchdrunk getting a bit greedy?) - and despite being asked by the young woman at the entrance to explore it on your own, twenty-something girls insisted on walking around in pairs, as did larger groups of students and husbands and wives. Some of them even took off their masks and congregating to discuss the scenes. I even saw some people step over a character, on the floor, during a scene, instead of stopping to watch what would unfold. Why do any of this, guys? Why not try to lose yourself in the play and wait until the end, or perhaps over a drink in the Palais Royale musical theatre, to talk about the stories? I suspect that, many of us who went to 'Faust', knew the form and appreciated that you should walk around on your own... so if you're reading this and are about to see the show, please think about abandoning from your partner or friends for three hours and losing yourself in the narrative. Anyway, enjoy... because there are lots of treats in store. - Andrew B
14 Oct 07
I can't say I got all the stories or that it satisfies in a narrative sense, but the theatricality is extrordinary and the last half-hour or so, as I was swept from a manic dinner to a surreal dance in a full-size ballroom took my breath away. The originality of Punchdrunk means that for each person the first will probably always the best, but this is my third and I still wouldn't miss them for the world. - Gareth James
10 Oct 07
A wonderful experience, I didn't really know what to expect but it touched me in various ways, some of them quite literally!! I read somewhere that it's like being in a dream you can control and that sums it up well. - Paul W
07 Oct 07
Beautiful, chilling, oppressive, elusive. A step forwards from Faust in its level of detail and atmosphere, better because you don't have to worry about following a story. - Cardinal Pirelli
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