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punch-drunk, adj. (orig. U.S.) Stupefied by or as if by a series of heavy blows.
Over the past decade, Punchdrunk, one of Britain's foremost experimental theatre companies, has been working with stories and spaces of epic proportion. The company's ability to exploit sound, light, movement, and environment, merging mass spectacle with intimate audience experiences, has earned them widespread critical acclaim. Between 2000 and 2003, founder and artistic director Felix Barrett embarked with the company on a series of adaptations of classic texts. In 2000, they created The Cherry Orchard, based on the play by Anton Chekhov, and The House of Oedipus, which combined Sophocles's Oedipus the King and Antigone and was staged across thirteen acres of a Victorian garden at Poltimore House in Devon. In 2002, they produced Midsummer Night's Dream, based on Shakespeare's comedy, and Chair, an adaptation of Ionesco's absurdist play The Chairs. In 2003, they presented their adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest and Sleep No More, a reworking of Macbeth. Common to each of these productions was an audience experience of disorientation and discovery, whereby text and language were taken apart and core themes were reworked in large-scale installations on unconventional sites. Within these highly detailed and atmospheric environments, scenes were often performed as timed loops, allowing the audience to roam freely through the space and pursue individual narratives inside thematically holistic worlds.
In 2003, choreographer Maxine Doyle joined the company to work on Sleep No More, Punchdrunk's Hitchcock-inspired adaptation of Macbeth (revived in 2010 for production at the American Repertory Theatre in Boston, USA). This marked a clear shift on Barrett's part towards a physical dramaturgy in which body and space took precedence over text. Doyle explains further:
We were interested in re-engaging with language and re-introducing it into the performance text [...] but it was about trying to find a way of making the spoken word as experiential as the body.
Since Sleep No More, Punchdrunk's work has continued on this movement-based trajectory, pushing the artistic and ethical boundaries of audience participation and developing a poetics of the senses relative to the demands of "liveness" in a mediatised age. In this article, I will examine the key themes, concepts, and methodologies that have informed Punchdrunk's major works since 2003.
"Audience...