The Masque of the Red Death

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?

– Heather Neill