Michael Coveney: Latest from Punchdrunk premieres in a primary school

No big deal in that, you might think. Except that Punchdrunk’s most ambitious show to date, which opened in the middle of a sticky July, way before the Edinburgh Festival, is having to fight for its audience (ideally, 600 of them a night) in a way they’ve never had to before. They’re seriously into marketing meetings. They’ve even taken advertising on the tube.

Meanwhile, their acclaimed New York variation on Macbeth, Sleep No More – ironically playing in a West Chelsea venue previously occupied by a restaurant called “Bed” – continues to play to packed audiences with not a glimmer of organised publicity.

As it happens, and quite remarkably by chance, I was wending my way back onto the South Bank from Punchdrunk’s latest new performance, The Lost Lending Library. Where’s that, I hear you cry? In a primary school in Catford. Yes, I know, it was more difficult to find even than a warehouse in Wapping, the BAC on Lavender Hill or the mystery old Royal Mail site in Paddington.

But here’s the thing: it’s only 20 minutes long. And it’s much better than The Drowned Man. And, what’s more, perhaps even more surprisingly, it’s got a really good actor in it. Yes, just one actor, playing a scatty librarian called Miss Peabody, who’s ensconced in a typical Punchdrunk heavily detailed environment of illuminated books, musty old paperbacks, tiny models and mementoes and even a model railway track that is magically animated when the story she’s telling us recounts how a boy who lives on the uninhabited (except by goats) Isle of Egg imagines he’s become a train driver in his sleep.

What’s going on, then? Is this another outpost of Sean Holmes‘s Secret Theatre, where nobody knows what’s happening? No, it’s part of Punchdrunk Enrichment, a workshop wing of the company launched four years ago (Punchdrunk itself was started by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle in 2000 AD) to operate in primary and secondary schools throughout London, creating shows and projects in tandem with the children, as well as their teachers and parents; there are residencies in Westminster, projects in Hackney and initiatives in Lewisham.

Why do they bother? It’s not as if Punchdrunk owes anyone anything, or needs to conform to the gaderene rush towards educational projects and schools work that taps into the readily available charitable funding and political approval for such endeavours these days. No, explains senior producer Colin Nightingale, one of Barrett’s closest friends and colleagues, on the return train journey into Waterloo; this really is to do with core Punchdrunk values in finding new designers, new locations, new audiences, new ideas.

The Lost Lending Library was installed in Holy Cross Primary School over one weekend a few weeks ago, magically appearing after the children had been talked to by the project leader about reading and writing, and the sorts of stories they enjoyed; then, over these last weeks, they’ve entered Miss Peabody’s room in groups of ten, listened to her talk (while being interrupted by telephone calls from elsewhere in the library; this is the largest collection of books in the world, after all) and emerged with a certificate enrolling them as apprentices. They then disperse to write their own stories.

The last show from Punchdrunk Enrichment was called Under the Eiderdown, the story of a stripy horse in a bric-a-brac shop run by a Mrs Weevil who sends out letters to the children asking them to come in and help her, as the shop is threatened with closure. There’s a common metaphor here with the Lost Library, as both shows seem to be about maintaining social services at a time of cut-backs and recession. The value of books and bric-a-brac is obvious to everyone except politicians and town-planners.

So I took that leaflet on which The Drowned Man is described by Metro as “a gigantic, mind-altering labyrinth.” I was still glowing from my excursion into a much cosier maze of magic down Catford way.