The immersive adventure begins with a sleep. We are invited to lie down as the lights fade and the story begins, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. Her voice pours into our ears through binaural headphones, sometimes velvety and playful, other times a scratching whisper.
She tells a tangled tale, written by Booker-nominated novelist Daisy Johnson and featuring the parallel lives of a modern-day teenager alongside a princess. A re-imagining of Barry Pain’s 1901 short story The Moon-Slave, it is steeped in Victorian gothic, featuring Dionysian femininity, but also a prince, a disappearance and a grief-soaked journey into the night.
There is unfinished business to the concept: the company’s first show in 2000 was an interpretation of Pain’s story, only seen by four people due to cost constraints. Two decades on, the story is squeezed into a winding series of unlit corridors through which we travel wearing our headsets, and in which the everyday intersects with the otherworldly, from the teenager’s sparkly, poster-clad bedroom to a castle’s gothic interior and glittering forests. Johnson’s parallel worlds hold shades of Narnia – we wander through children’s dens and wardrobes to find fantasy realms nestling within the quotidian.
Conceived by Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett who co-directs with Hector Harkness, it is a darkly alluring production which plays with well-worn tropes but spins them in unfamiliar ways. “It’s all a dream, surely?” says the narrator as the tale takes strange twists and it feels like a beautiful, enveloping one that hovers delicately between bedtime story, fairytale, children’s game and nightmare.
Where The Burnt City, the company’s inaugural show in their sprawling new south-east London home, left you stranded in its depths, this is its polar opposite. It is tightly story-lined with only one way to go: towards the lights winking a path ahead of us.
And where that production was monumental, this is boutique, intimate, wrapping us in its folds. Groups of up to six venture into the space under instruction of silence but a sense of togetherness grows. We enter without footwear and the textures change underfoot, from a cushiony, soft-play style floor to the sand-carpeted floors of Pain’s story and then soft grit, which leaves you vulnerably feeling as if we have steered off a path into lost, bracken-floored woodlands.
The pitch darkness holds us in safety at times but also skulks around us, as if alive (lighting design by Simon Wilkinson). But then we turn a corner and the light throws up a thrilling vision: a tree as luminous as a Yayoi Kusama installation; a hastily left banquet, gorgeously dainty in its opulence. There is dazzling miniaturisation with tiny castles whose lanterns twinkle alongside large cut-out silhouettes that have the effect of a lifesize zoetrope.
The story does not follow rational logic but turns into a weird kind of liminal babble dealing in unnameable fear, and you feel it as you travel through ever darker, narrower spaces. Central to the sensory world-building is the sound design by Gareth Fry. The playlist – Massive Attack, Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos – conjures a mood and a 1990s adolescent world before switching back to fairytale with Bach’s St Matthew Passion.
There is exquisite detail to the rooms we roam through, co-designed by Barrett and Casey Jay Andrews, especially in the strewn detritus of a teenager’s life but with surreal edges, such as sheaves of paper with redacted text and upturned furniture, which gives the sense of a darker universe encroaching the ordinary one.
Barely an hour long, it inspires so much puzzling wonder that you want to go straight back in to find other undisturbed paths in the search for Viola.
