The emotional heft and sheer scale of this immersive show inspired by the Trojan War blows you away. The first major venture in the capital for eight years from leaders in the field Punchdrunk, it sees them create epic visual images – a princess bride murdered as an offering atop a giant tank trap, a vast concrete slab that becomes a catwalk for lust and violence - and minutely detailed environments in their new base in Woolwich’s historic military buildings.
Recent events inevitably add to its savage poignancy. The two huge spaces of the Arsenal and the adjoining artillery museum unfold like an other-worldly maze amid the run-down shops and jarring new apartment towers of Woolwich. I was comprehensively won over even though the experience requires a degree of sheeplike surrender, common to immersive theatre.
As in previous Punchdrunk shows, founder Felix Barrett and his co-director and choreographer Maxine Doyle rely on bold, elegant, wordless movement and a marrow-curdling soundscape for a powerful evocation of mood. Stephen Dobbie’s score blends thunder, keening and wrenching chords to devastating effect. We wander or are subtly led by the silent, solemn cast members through a series of intricate, dream-like rooms. None of the performers is identified by name but they’re all cool-looking, acrobatic and aloof: I particularly liked the imposing, barefoot Clytemnestra.
One of the vast buildings represents Troy, where stylishly neon-lit interwar hotels and shops with names like Elysium and Hesperides give way to warrens of bedsits full of brimming ashtrays, faulty wiring and sad mirrors. The attention to detail in the design – by Barrett, Livi Vaughn and Beatrice Minns – is borderline obsessive. Furniture and evocative nick-nacks cover every surface, bars sport the names of classically-accented cocktails: a stack of canned tomatoes proves to be a brand called Mount Pelion, the home of Cheiron the Centaur in Greek myth.
A sandy battlefield in the second, connected building opens up into a huge, two-tier space representing Mycenae. Here Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia below and is then murdered up above by his queen Clytemnestra and her lover. Shamefully, it took me all of the first hour to find my way to this second space: and another hour to find the bar.
The audience is required to wear blank, carnival-style plastic masks which leads to a certain amount of sweaty blundering through the early roomscapes. But there are multiple chances to catch the main arc of the narrative, which is repeated in a kind of mesmerised loop. And everyone seems to end up in the right place for the ending, where semi-naked bodies twist and fall in a danse macabre.
There’s an earnestness here that thankfully stops just short of absurdity. I slightly resent the way immersive theatre relies on FOMO, the promise that something more exciting is in the next room. And I wonder where spectating shades into voyeurism: quite often here masked crowds cluster around women changing their tops. But chiefly I was overawed by the rich, vivid, momentous achievement of Barratt, Doyle and their cast and cohorts here. Simply astonishing.
