I was just browsing through my feeds when I came across a post on Design Mom that got me all kinds of nostalgic. This quick review of the show Sleep No More sounded brilliant to me from the word go. Come to find out, I followed the link and the original show was created by the company I watched ages ago during my student days in London: Punchdrunk. These people are genius.
Back in 2008 when I was on my semester abroad, one of our classes was about theatre. We got to see Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wannamaker as the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the National Theatre, we saw Anton Lesser in The Vertical Hour, and amongst all the others, my personal favourite was The Masque of the Red Death by Punchdrunk at the Battersea Arts Centre.
The whole building was taken over for the show. When you came in, you were fitted for a cloak and a mask, after which you were allowed to spend the better part of three hours roaming freely around the building. A series of vignettes from Edgar Allan Poe stories were played out and the entirety of the inside of the building was unrecognizable. One minute, you were walking down the staircase of an eerily lit ballroom; the next you were hiding in a cave in the woods, rifling through the possessions of some deranged hedge witch. If you took yourself back across the ballroom (past the violent and impending scene of rape) you could make your way down to a cellar in which either Fortunado or Madeline Usher would have felt right at home.
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| via, the NY Times |
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| by Sara Krulwich, via Print |
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| by Sara Krulwich, via Print |
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| by Sara Krulwich, via Print |
Anyone else ever done something like this? Anyone want to? Anyone willing to sneak me out to NYC for 36 hours so I can go see Punchdrunk again? Please?
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