UK’s top immersive experience company presents its newest montage, breaking from the style of their previous shows and featuring astonishing highlights, including a full-length narration recorded by Helena Bonham Carter. Guillermo Nazara chats with one its lead creatives, to learn more about this alternative piece of storytelling, and shed some light on this haunting recount dwelling in the dark.
How did the idea for the show come about?
At Punchdrunk, we are always trying to break new ground. After our last London show, The Burnt City, we wanted to try something really different. Using everything we have learnt over the last 20 or so years, we are trying to tell a story in a new way – giving audiences a really intimate experience. Most of our big shows contain one-on-one experiences that allow for small intimate encounters to happen between an audience member and performers. This is a big one! The show is based on a Victorian gothic horror called The Moonslave. It’s a brilliantly mysterious and enigmatic short story, and it was the inspiration for an intimate one-person show Punchdrunk created very early on in our existence. Now we’ve decided to revisit the story and reimagine it, working with writer Daisy Johnson to turn it into a new kind of adventure.
What is Viola’s Room? What are we to expect in this new production?
It’s a very different kind of physical experience. Previous Punchdrunk shows are partly about the thrill of exploring a space at will and piecing together your own adventure. In Viola’s Room, you’ll flow through a story, beat by beat, riding the wave of it. We’re asking audiences to step into the dark and let us take their hands on a journey. What’s exciting for us is the opportunity to tell a tale from beginning to end, to distil what we love about sensory experiences into a compact design installation with a spine-tingling story at its core.
This piece comes as a result of a long period of experimentation in the immersive experience field. What has its creation allowed you to explore?
Viola’s Room is the culmination of twenty years of work. It distils everything we have learned in terms of space, light, sound and adventure into a truly unique experience. For a long time we have focussed as a company on telling stories in which the audience is allowed to decide their own journey. This time it has been very exciting to create a linear narrative that the audience moves through.
Does this montage take the immersive experience concept to another level in some way?
We hope so, although that ultimately is for the audience to decide. What is certain is that as a company we try to not rest on our laurels and keep the work developing and moving forward. Hopefully Viola’s Room does that for people!
What have been the biggest challenges of putting this piece together?
We are making loads of new discoveries as we piece this project together. Taking a beautiful story and bringing it to life with incredible lighting, ground-breaking sound design and a precise, detailed and atmospheric set design will hopefully produce a really memorable experience for people.
Apart from Helena Bonham Carter’s contribution as the narrator, what would you say are the highlights of this production?
A combination of Daisy Johnson’s beautiful words, Gareth Fry’s brilliant sound design, Simon Wilkinson’s detailed and precise lighting design and Casey Jay Andrew’s richly detailed set design are right up there.
Why come see Viola’s Room?
Viola’s Room is for anyone who remembers the magical thrill of being read a bedtime story and slipping off into dreamland. We think it’s unlike anything you will have seen before, so if you have an appetite for mind-bending new experiences, please come.
Read our review on Viola’s Room here!
Viola’s Room plays at Punchdrunk, London’s One Cartridge Place, until 18 August. Tickets are available on the following link.