It turns out that Punchdrunk really doesn’t like the term “interactive”. The veteran theatre company, which for more than 20 years has been inviting audiences to don its trademark white mask and get on their feet to explore detailed theatrical worlds and follow the stories of any of the myriad characters they may encounter, much prefers the term “immersive”. Which may appear as a bit of a non-starter for us here in the voidspace, given that we are, after all, very much about interactivity.
Dig a little deeper, however, and there are plenty of parallels between Punchdrunk’s work and the kinds of interactivity that make us tick. Perhaps not change-the-plot, choose-your-own-adventure style interactivity, but something equally engaging: theatre that gives the audience ways to connect with the narrative in ways that shake them out of passive consumption. And narrative that bites back, as performers are given the ability to connect directly with the audience, eye to eye.
Punchdrunk’s latest production, The Burnt City, is a retelling of some of the key stories of the Trojan war, by way of the neon-soaked vision of Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner and Fritz Lang’s expressionist epic, Metropolis. Audiences can follow the stories of Hecuba and Agamemnon and their families, members of the Greek army and a raft of gods, prophets and ordinary people, each with their own secrets to unravel.
We spoke to company stalwarts Kat McGarr, Miranda Mac Letten and Sam Booth about The Burnt City, the kinds of interactivity to be found in Punchdrunk’s work, and the joys and challenges of working with a roving, free-range audience.
voidspace:
First, I wanted to ask a more general question about The Burnt City and how the audience is invited to interact with the world of the show.
Kat McGarr:
It’s narrative. The audience get to choose who they follow, therefore they get to choose the kind of narrative or the story that they want to digest. It’s not interactive in other ways, like with other companies I work for, which is so directly interactive. So, the word interactive feels quite hard to apply to it.
Sam Booth:
Punchdrunk have never…I don’t think we’d ever use the word interactive to describe what we do because it would be a bit misleading.
Kat McGarr:
Immersive!
Sam Booth:
We tend to want to inhibit the audience from doing certain things. We play the game of invisibility. They wear the masks, which inhibit them from talking out loud, and we pretend we can’t see them. We have to be careful to try to limit the audience’s behaviour in certain ways, while wanting to allow them a sense of freedom, which is quite a difficult balance to strike. We tend not to use the word “interactive” because it suggests something quite different… I think people would often find it quite offputting as well, if they were expected to talk, and adopt a character, and interact with the actors and so on. I think you’ve put your finger on it: that it’s interactive in the sense that they choose where to move. Where to stand, what to look at: that’s the kind of agency they have.
Kat McGarr:
With the [in-show] bar shows, obviously, it is slightly different, because the mask is removed, so that the audience is interacting directly with the performer, and the space and the action.
Sam Booth:
Like cabaret or stand-up comedy would be. But we don’t normally use the word “interactive” to describe those kinds of things. But of course they’re interactive. All theatre should be interactive in a certain way, you could say. But that’s not quite…we’re talking about something very particular, aren’t we?
voidspace:
It sounds like what you’re doing is actually putting quite stringent measures in place to control how people feel at liberty to interact or act within the space, but also maintaining that illusion of freedom. It is partly illusory, because there are rules of engagement, but you want people to feel like they’re empowered, but to know where that stops as well. I imagine that must have taken quite a lot of time to get right as well over the years, trying to work out how to manage that dynamic.
Kat McGarr:
But still within that, I suppose what is the interaction?
Sam Booth:
When you come into the space and you pick up an object in the set, that’s a physical interaction with the environment. You wouldn’t normally be able to wander onto the set in a mainstream theatre. So, you’re interacting with an environment, you’re interacting with a performer. If it’s eye contact, that’s an interaction, a kind of exchange. It’s not interactive to the extent of having a story yourself that has multiple endings or an impact on the narratives that we’re telling.
Kat McGarr:
I think those moments of eye contact are really important, because they are the moments where we are directly saying, “I recognise you watching and I’m inviting you in, in a different way”. Because other than that, we “don’t” otherwise [holds up hands in scare quotes] see you.
Sam Booth:
Just last night, the first scene where Persephone comes into Hades’ house and she goes and looks at the painting, I tend to have eye contact with the audience at that point. I turn and look. And the guy I looked at last night made a kind of shrugging gesture, like this [shrugs]. And so, I responded with the same, [shrugs] so we both sort of shrugged at each other. That was an interaction.
Kat McGarr:
But it wasn’t planned!
Sam Booth:
It wasn’t “interactive”. When you say “interactive theatre” to people, they’re thinking of something a bit different from that, aren’t they? Impacting the plot and having an adventure yourself. You could go to Secret Cinema, and then you get sent on a mission or something like that.
voidspace:
I wanted to ask about the differences with Secret Cinema. Miranda, I know you have performed with Secret Cinema before, and I’m interested to hear what you’ve learned. Is there any cross pollination between these two types of immersive work, or are they very separate disciplines?
Miranda Mac Letten:
What they both have in common is this illusion of free will. I get annoyed when people call things immersive when they don’t have this: when they’re so heavily guided that no longer this illusion of free will, is there. That’s what I think Punchdrunk and Secret Cinema do massively have in common.
As for differences, the level of interaction, yes, is very different, but it also attracts a very different kind of person. I think the kind of person that comes to a Punchdrunk show is slightly more reserved, slightly enjoys being the voyeur more, wants to engage, but hasn’t maybe quite got the confidence or the desire to be thrown into the middle of the drama. Whereas at Secret Cinema, we very much build things on the basis of putting the audience in the centre of our narrative.
So, whenever we build any mission, or interaction, or gameplay, it is about taking what the audience give us into the centre of our narrative and making them feel like they’ve massively influenced what you’re doing. The illusion is, I’m trying to give these instructions. I’m going to give you this information, but I’m going to make sure that you feel like you’ve caused this to happen, always.
Whereas with Punchdrunk, it’s an opposite world to Secret Cinema, in the way that you’ve stumbled into a room, and you’ve seen something perhaps you shouldn’t have, and suddenly someone stared at you and that’s how you’ve been pulled in. The set ups are very different, opposites, but still have the crux of this illusion of free will.
voidspace:
The power dynamic is almost completely opposite, isn’t it, really. Obviously, you’re in control in both, but the sense of who’s in control is different in both of them.
Sam Booth:
Yeah, I think it’s right that it appeals to different tastes. I’ve seen some interactive theatre where you were able to interact with the performers and really impact on the narrative and there were different outcomes possible. I’ve seen different examples of what I just described, and some were very successful, but other times it just felt a bit superficial, the different outcomes. Like a sporting event. Either this character won, or this character won, and you can impact that outcome, but it left me feeling a bit… [shrugs] “so what?” Even if I had an impact on the narrative, it wasn’t particularly dramatically interesting either way.
I think in our format, we take responsibility for the storytelling. We don’t really want that to be interfered with. It’s a foregone conclusion.
With the one-on-ones [Punchdrunk’s trademark, where a single audience member is selected by a character and taken into a locked room, to receive a scene performed only to them], we’re creating a little window where we have this illusion of interactivity and an illusion of free will, but it’s going to go on rails. It’s going in this one direction, and it’s very set. But when you have an exchange with someone, if you ask a question and you show that you’ve heard the response that they’ve given, by responding to it or repeating it, it creates a feeling of interaction.
Kat McGarr:
I mean, again, there is a bit more interaction in Peep [The Burnt City’s in-show bar], where you are asking questions of people in-world and you’re asking them to play in-world and respond.
Miranda Mac Letten:
I think it can be done well or badly in both worlds. I think what is important is the structure of the interaction. And I think you need a clear in, a clear way into the interaction. You need clear substance in the middle, and then you need a clear ending. And if you don’t have a clear out, an in and out, the person you’re interacting with is left feeling confused. Not quite finished: did I do it right? Did I do it wrong? And then the engagement is weak and whether this is improvised or set, I think neither is right or wrong. I love both. The structure for me is what’s important, in the substance and the out.
Kat McGarr:
I’m just thinking about how we move audience. So, if we find that they are in our way, in a world where we’re not “seeing” them, as in the world of the show as opposed to the bar. You’re talking about how we’ve developed, how we interact.
And actually that’s a really important part, that when we move them, they don’t feel like they’ve done something wrong but it’s actually just we are acknowledging that they are there, very casually, [very casually places hands on Sam Booth’s shoulder] and making sure that they firmly but warmly understand how they need to or where they need to be.
Sam Booth:
What we’re saying, I suppose, is that there are different types of interaction. I think eye contact or physical contact, or nonverbal exchanges, tend to be underrated in terms of interaction, and plot-based interaction, giving you a character and involving you in the story is maybe overrated.
The “send you on a mission” kind of interaction- I think it’s clever to pull off that stuff, but the real kind of human exchange interaction, I think that’s the more valuable. It tends to get devalued. Just like when we talk about agency: does the audience have agency in a Punchdrunk show? Well, yes, they do. People complain that they don’t because they’re not influencing the action, but they do have agency in terms of where they walk, what they look at, who they follow, what they pick up. They are making choices all the time. It’s just not what we think of as “agency” “, somehow it doesn’t count. But it’s a kind of agency that is underrated as agency. It’s key to the appeal of our work, for the people our work appeals to.
voidspace:
It’s powerful, isn’t it? You have so much to choose from in terms of story and setting and documents and stuff that you can’t help but have to, if you’re going to engage with it properly, you can’t help but piece it together in your own head and make your own story. And it actually gives you ownership of the story in a way that you wouldn’t have if someone else is just asking you to choose between A and B.
Kat McGarr:
And I think that’s another thing that’s really important to highlight, that you can interact with a room that has no performer in it. And that’s the beauty of Punchdrunk, I think, that you can walk into every room and the set designers have thought about the character that lives there and have really created that world for you to pick apart and draw from it the story that you want to. I think that’s an important part of the interaction within Punchdrunk.
voidspace:
You talk about the difference between the kind of interaction in Punchdrunk, and the kind of ‘send-you on a mission’ interaction that you get with companies such as Secret Cinema, but I have noticed in The Burnt City something a bit more of that nature creeping in. Small, low-stakes micro-missions if you like. Such as, Miranda, your Watchman character getting an audience member to help you wheel your trolley from Mycenae to Troy. And Sam, your character, Hades getting an audience member to fetch his opera glasses from his office. How did those sort of interactions develop?
Sam Booth:
That just started happening – I am just taking advantage of the fact that I can do that. We made a change to my show, and at that point I want to have those opera glasses for my next scene, but I don’t want to carry them around. They make my pockets bulge. I could only carry them in my coat pocket, which I’m not wearing then. And if I were to get them myself, I would be leading the audience into the room where they are kept and straight back out again. And that would be frustrating. You can’t lead the audience somewhere and turn around and leave again with no payoff for the journey. So, asking someone to fetch them economises my travelling, and it also means I can have time to keep a little bit of material which I can do while the person runs the errand for me, which otherwise I would have to cut, if I were to go and do it myself.
And it’s a bonus for the person I ask. They get given a little thing to do. They get involved in a low-key way. And then hopefully, there’s a little payoff for that person because that’s the person that then I’ll talk to a bit at the bistro table. I’m just using the audience in a way that’s hopefully interesting, but it wasn’t a conscious policy to design the show in that way. It’s just that my character happens to have that luxury of playful interaction, a little bit like the Peep hosts do, when they get someone to help them get changed, to get someone involved.
Because I’m the host, effectively of the show. I see the audience more than any other character. I sometimes don’t see them, but pretty much in every scene, I’m shooting the occasional look back at individuals. I’m always aware of them from start to finish. I can see them, touch them, use them in any whimsical way that occurs to me. I just have that luxury, and I abuse it happily.
Only one person has ever let me down with the opera glasses! It’s not like a challenge, like a riddle. It’s not like an escape room puzzle. It’s nothing like that. It’s very clear what they have to do. I’ll say:“Fetch my opera glasses. They’res in the pocket of my coat that’s hanging on the wall in there. I’ll be over here”. So there’s no puzzle dimension to it. And it’s not much of a treat either. It’s just a very simple physical task It is just operating on the principle that any interaction or physical action to involve someone is inherently interesting, even if it’s not a stretch, even if there’s no real choice involved. Performing even the simplest of real physical actions in this unreal world has a heightened experiential value.
It was an improvisation. Like a lot of things in the show, you just do it in the spur of the moment, and then you do it again the next night, and then it becomes part of the show. What I enjoy about it is how it comes across to other audience members when I’m sat outside the bistro, maybe having a little interaction with them, having my interaction with Eurydice, who’s bringing me the teacup and so forth, and someone just comes up and hands me the opera glasses. They see that, which is a slightly surprising thing to see. Intriguing. It might make you wonder how it came about. And it creates an impression of my status and my mastery of the environment.
And I never know exactly what time they’re going to turn up as well. So, exactly how the arrival of the opera glasses interweaves with my interaction with other people and with Eurydice as well, is a pleasurably unpredictable… It’s just a playful little bit.
I did start thinking, is there enough reward for the person who delivers the opera glasses? I would normally take the opera glasses and say, “Bless you”, and then sort of ignore them. But recently I decided there should be more of a payoff to round off the interaction. So, then I decided my lines that I say about what I’m looking at through the opera glasses, I should say to them, really, because then that gives it more of a satisfying resolution, a reward for having participated. So that’s what I do now. I’m being conscious of making it more satisfying, more substantial than just using someone.
I came to that after a while, because it is quite an unusual thing: I’ve not done that kind of thing in these shows before, sending people on little missions. It does feel like it’s like a little bit of a departure. But that’s just tied into the nature of my character in this show, who is someone that who is aware of the audience all the time. Greeting them at the top of the show and then effectively playing host to these visitors throughout
voidspace:
And I suppose Hades and Persephone are a lot more game breaking than any other character because they break the loop structure so firmly outside of it. It probably gives you a bit more latitude.
Sam Booth:
Yeah, definitely.
Miranda Mac Letten:
It’s a bit too much like Secret Cinema, for Punchdrunk traditionally. But the immersive landscape has developed in Punchdrunk’s absence, since the last show [Punchdrunk’s previous large scale London show, The Drowned Man, which closed in 2014] and people have been craving a higher level of involvement in the action of this show. This is something Felix [Barrett, Punchdrunk’s Artistic Director] has really encouraged.
That particular interaction happened because I had a shoulder injury and needed help pushing the trolley, so I leaned into my Secret Cinema skills. I would not have normally made a choice to engage like that in a Punchdrunk show. It stayed though, because people responded so well, and it felt appropriate in the end.
Felix talks about the audience in the “Fall of Troy” scene [where Agamemnon’s invading army bursts through to Troy town square, the soldiers and the women of Troy face off, and Polyxena, Hecuba’s daughter, sacrifices herself], saying that he wants them to feel complicit in the action. They become less like ghosts in this scene, and more like the Greek army and the people of Troy. What we would call a ‘populator’ in Secret Cinema terms – people who are using a setting for its intended purpose (so at Secret Cinema the people who fill a bar or restaurant) and create a real environment and atmosphere for you to play a scene). So, it felt right in this context to slightly break our rules of interaction.
Punchdrunk rules are that we are only meant to “see” the audience when the veil between our worlds becomes thin, when your character is in a heightened emotional state, allowing you to be able to see the ghosts around you – for instance when you are dead, mad, intoxicated or magical yourself. The Watchman is none of these things in this moment, but I got around it with the fact that we are going to war, and the audience will become the army when they enter the doors of Troy with Agamemnon. So, it seemed right to start introducing this element a fraction earlier in relation to the scene.
Felix loves breaking his own rules. Hades and Persephone are a perfect example of that – the first ever characters fully outside of the loop structure.
voidspace:
That brings me on quite nicely to the role of the audience in general. In The Burnt City, you give the audience a role: as an audience member you’re putting on the mask and you’re adopting a certain identity. In The Burnt City, you’re shades in the underworld or in The Drowned Man, you were visitors at a wrap party. Then when you move into a one to one, I’ve noticed that the audience is given another role, mentally and emotionally. So sometimes you’ll be being treated as if you were a lover, or a child etc. I’m really interested in how you work that out and how that works.
Kat McGarr:
It’s very character dependent, and what that character needs that one-on-one to be.
That secret with the audience. Like, if someone has followed you and they get the one-on-one, it’s kind of a gift into that character. A deeper look, a deeper dig into what’s going on with that character. And so, it’s character dependent. Like, for the Oracle, the one-on-one, it was really important that it was just a secret to share with a confidant, someone that you feel like you can trust.
Miranda Mac Letten:
I just think it’s important to know who they are when creating any kind of immersive show, because it gives the interaction integrity. It makes it feel more real in a way than if you’re just doing actions with a meaningless person in a meaningless space. You give it weight, you give it agency, you give it all the things it needs to leave you feeling like you felt something. And if you are confused as to who the person you’re interacting is with, all these things become muddy.
Sam Booth:
For a scene in a regular play to have dramatic function, a character should need something from the other character. That’s the same with our scenes, when we have a scene with the audience. The audience need a reason to be there. The character should need something from the audience member. Otherwise, it’s not dramatic. And otherwise, like you say, it’s not real. It just might end up feeling like a performance. Like, I’m just going to perform for you my little scene. But that’s what we’re trying to subvert. If we’re trying to involve the audience, or make them feel they’re in an alternate world, they need a role in that. They need to be endowed with some kind of characteristic or reason to be there. There’s a reason for sharing with them this secret, or for telling them this story that you’re telling them, or showing them the object that you’re showing them. The character needs to need them for a reason. So therefore, they need first to be seen by the character as something or other. To be perceived as possessing some particular quality, perhaps.
Kat McGarr:
They need to be what the character needs them to be.
Sam Booth:
Yes, to justify the activity, to make the scene, like you say, feel real.
voidspace:
I wanted to go back for a moment to Peep – the in-show bar. You’ve talked about interaction in this space being akin to cabaret or stand-up comedy, but I think there’s more going on here and I’d like to explore that. Peep is so firmly in-world that it’s a different (albeit lighter sillier, more accessible) way of engaging with the wider world of the show, so you still feel part of it, even if you prefer a more traditional sit-down experience. Then you’ve got characters from outside coming into Peep to perform and interact with the hosts, and maybe a tiny bit with the audience, but without breaking the Punchdrunk mystery by coming down to our level. But the hosts properly break the fourth wall with us, so we are drawn into the interactions with main show characters too, by association.
Kat McGarr:
I love that. That is so bang on. This is the first time we’ve created a bar space that is very much part of the world of the show, for those who prefer a more traditional exchange of performance, whilst keeping the integrity of Punchdrunk.
Miranda Mac Letten:
Peep is an environment that is a more conventional set-up. This does allow an audience that’s newer to Punchdrunk to relax, talk about what they are experiencing, understand quicker how to behave and what’s expected of them. Punchdrunk’s format can be a lot, and the familiarity can be comforting. There is also plenty for the braver audience, who wish to talk and interact with the bar hosts, see in-world characters come in and out, and choose to follow or not.
Kat McGarr:
Honestly when making the show, I looked so much at the Weimar era as per the direction from Felix and Max [Maxine Doyle – Punchdrunk’s Associate Director and Choreographer], and the traditional sense of cabaret. That for me is that it is like an underground mirror of the world outside fusing entertainment with political comment and satire. Making people feel alive in the world in which they are in – not alienating them but including them. In this sense the world is Troy, but also and always with a knowing nod to our current outside world too. There has to be, as the audience are there, masks off, live and direct sitting in a show in Woolwich in 2023.
In Peep we are all knowing: we know we are doomed. We know we live in eternal darkness. We highlight it, we play with it etc., and we invite the audience to be part of that, through laughter and silly and inclusivity – Cabaret!
The world of the show is so dark, it needs that to shed the light not only narratively but spiritually – to lift the spirits of the audience. I felt we had a bigger job than ever to really combat the darkness of the show whilst sitting in it also.
voidspace:
And before we get onto some more general questions, just going back to something Miranda was saying earlier. I was thinking about how the interactions in these shows can engineer a kind of complicity. So, in The Burnt City, you can be drawn in to feel part of the invading army and that’s a form of complicity. And in The Drowned Man too, [Sam Booth’s character] Mr Stanford, the arc of interactions and one-on-ones seemed to draw on that sense of complicity too.
Sam Booth:
Complicity was a theme of The Drowned Man because the theatre audience was, in a way, placed in the role of Hollywood‘s audience. That’s what Stanford’s doing, he’s consciously serving the public. And there was a parallel that we were drawing between Hollywood and Punchdrunk. I’m feeding you, the public, the audience, the things that you enjoy, spectacles of sex and death, which…a lot of content in Hollywood and Punchdrunk is like that. We do enjoy that as spectators. So that was the theme: I’m giving you what you want, I’m giving the people what they want. And that’s you. You’re the audience. So, there was a real clear parallel.
He was engineering an extreme kind of naturalism in cinema, which involved real violence, real sex for the enjoyment of the public. He had his finger on the public’s pulse, and he believed it was ready for that kind of thing. There was a darkening sensibility in America, and he was slightly ahead of the curve. He But humans will always be compelled by the spectacle of how bodies behave. The real-life Stanford famously commissioned photographs of horses running, which became an origin story of cinema. And that links to the very earliest prehistoric cave paintings which created an illusion of horses in motion. So, he stood for the whole history of human culture, feeding people’s hunger for the spectacle of bodies in motion. We want to see how bodies behave in extreme circumstances. Bodies having sex, falling over, fighting, dying… It’s true of Hollywood audiences, true of Punchdrunk audiences. So that complicity had a foundation in those ideas. The apparently all-powerful studio boss was serving a higher power: human ticket-buyers. The tragic story was engineered in the way it was because of their desires.
voidspace:
And how does that work in The Burnt City? Are you using interaction here to make us, the audience, complicit as well?
Sam Booth:
It’s less true here, because it’s not about that. Hades is almost more on the same level as the audience, as a spectator of human emotion, fascinated by intense suffering, but not someone who engineers it, just someone who marvels at it with a slightly detached, fascinated perspective. An aesthete. Like an art collector.
So, the theme of complicity isn’t really on my mind, but you’re still finding opportunities for involving the audience. It’s basic theatrical technique, a clowning technique: to find a connection with the audience through direct eye contact. When something happens in the scene you might give your reaction to the audience. It’s a basic theatrical way of involving them. You’re not ignoring the audience: you’re experiencing this, and then you’re showing your reaction to the audience directly, with eye contact.
You do that when you can, just to involve the audience. When I’m slow dancing before the tango with Persephone, I always eyeball an audience member and let them see I’m thinking something. When I feel Macaria’s heartbeat, I look someone in the eyes too. With Askalaphos in the flower shop, I roll my eyes a little bit at an audience member when he turns away. I find moments to give myself directly to the audience, and that’s a form of complicity. Like with Hamlet doing a soliloquy. It would always, in Shakespeare’s day, be delivered directly to the audience. If you go to the Globe now, they’ll still do that. That’s a form of complicity. Eye contact is a more powerful weapon when we use it sparingly. But I often take the opportunity, because it’s a live experience and I can do it, so I think I should. To make a connection and involve the audience, remind them that they are really there, and you are aware of them. It’s not a thematic thing: it’s just what we can do in our format.
The audience become the people of Troy, standing in Troy Square when the invasion happens, or they’re coming with the soldiers. I don’t think the intention is particularly to give anyone something to think about in terms of their moral responsibility There may be a dimension of that as well. You could say our format is the ultimate in fostering a truly levelled-out democracy of audience empathies, where you can choose any character in the story, on either side of the conflict, and by following see things from their perspective and identify with them. That’s part of it. But an important thing about tragedy – and we almost always perform tragedies – is the dissolving of normal categories of right and wrong, good and bad. The main thing for us is just a morally neutral idea of how to make the audience feel involved, immersed in the world, in the action. Or how to arrange them, like extras, to complete the picture.
voidspace:
What are the challenges of creating and performing this kind of work? Bit of an open question. Miranda’s laughing…
Sam Booth:
[Raises eyebrow] Challenges?!
Kat McGarr:
We make it from scratch, so to speak. I mean, you’re given the framework, but you do a lot before you find the thing that it is. And it’s always evolving, which is its beauty and its challenge, I suppose.
Miranda Mac Letten:
You never know until the audience are in…
Kat McGarr:
…and how the audience are going to move. A big part of why we get the audience in so early is that we have to make so much of it with an audience. We can only make so much before the audience come.
Miranda Mac Letten:
It’s unreal without the audience. It is not immersive, and you can’t predict any of the variables, which makes it incredible and special, but also…chaos!
voidspace:
We love the chaos. That’s what we live for. It’s interesting, though, like, how little of it you can actually get right until you’ve got the audience in there.
Kat McGarr:
From the audience’s point of view, how much it changes, from having direct contact with it as we do as performers. Thinking back to The Drowned Man and what the bar was in the beginning: it was like this sort of cowboy ho-downy sort of bar. And then it became something far removed from that.
voidspace:
Completely different, I never saw that. God, I didn’t know that. Wow.
Kat McGarr:
And that was all down to the audience – what the audience needed. How we needed them to feel, how that bar needed to make them feel.
voidspace:
It’s interesting how much of it is directly working on the emotions. Like NLP or something. You’re trying to work out those little pressure points to get those responses. Do your audiences ever surprise you?
Kat McGarr:
Yeah, like when they don’t move. One person was stood there, and I was like directly in front of the chair and like [moves from gentle touch to firmer guiding] and they just didn’t move. And I was like [solemn expression] I need you to move.
voidspace:
What else can you do?
Miranda Mac Letten:
You can do the same thing every night, that will work on what you think is everybody, from old lady to big bloke to a young teenager, and then suddenly the same thing will just not work, and someone will just yell at you, or something that just completely surprises you. After 300 shows of this format of whatever you’ve been doing that has been working.
voidspace:
It’s funny, but you know what, that sort of chaos energy, it feeds off onto the audience even if you’re not part of it. It gives the room a kind of a frisson that it wouldn’t have if it was all completely on the rails. I mean, that’s what makes it, isn’t it?
Sam Booth:
It’s alive, you can feel that: it’s theatre. A real, unique, unrepeatable and unrecordable event. It’s important that we’re striving for some kind of repetition, and precision, but at the same time, it’s not an achievable aim. The deviations from the regularity of it are what give it life and meaning, I think.
Miranda Mac Letten:
There’s an amazing thing that [fellow performer] Pin Chieh [Chen] did the other night. I’m just going to share this because it was a great story. It was in Klub, scene two, with Polydorus, Polyxena, Kampe. Everyone there, Kampe has been interacting with people before Polyxena’s come in. She’s left two audience by the chair in the middle of the room…she brought two audience members together with her hands. Her hands are like this and this behind the chair [holds her hand and Kat McGarr’s hand either side of an imaginary chair]. And then Polyxena comes in and Pin Chieh just goes to her [holds up hand, in a ‘stop’ motion], and the audience members are left there. They didn’t go anywhere, they just stayed there through the whole thing. Then Polyxena came, sat down in the chair. They stayed there. They went into the drinks, they all came back, they started dancing in the circle. They’re still there. That they’re still there. Pin notices that they’re still there, [fellow performer] Ferghas [Clavey] notices that they’re still there. Each of them takes one of their hands, dances them round in the circle with them.
voidspace:
Beautiful. Oh my goodness.
Miranda Mac Letten:
You could never predict that would happen. And it was one of the best things I’ve seen in a while. I really enjoyed it.
Sam Booth:
There are a couple of challenges that I am always struggling with, how to pitch performance. Can you relate to this? How much is too big and how much is too small, and how much is too stylized or too real. Where to pitch it.
[Kat McGarr and Miranda Mac Letten both nod]
Sam Booth:
I know we’re switching between real and stylized all the time, deliberately. Moving in and out of dance and naturalism. And also, you’re in close-up, much of the time, but sometimes you’re in a long shot. Sometimes you’re both at the same time.
Miranda Mac Letten:
Yeah.
Sam Booth:
When I’m speaking, how loud to speak? I want to be audible, but I have a tendency to be too loud and it sounds too fake. I’m always trying to negotiate. “That’s too much. Pull it back”. Or “That’s too little.” But also, where to be on the spectrum between telling the story very clearly – in which case it might stop being interesting, if we’re just giving it to them on a plate. On the other hand, there’s a danger in being too obscure, too cryptic. Because you want them to get it, but you don’t want it to be too easy. You want them to actually work for it a little bit. To be a bit like a detective. So, where to be on those spectrums is an endless challenge.
voidspace:
You’ve got to leave a bit of abstraction in there. Like, this show is a lot more literal than The Drowned Man.
Kat McGarr:
I think that’s really interesting, and I think it’s a lot to do with the fact that the Greek mythology is just so mind boggling, and there is so much, and that because we’ve pulled so many characters from all over the place, as well as sort of following these source texts of Hecuba and Agamemnon. I think it has to be more literal, to a certain extent, to allow the audience to access it. You know, Hollywood, 1960s, it’s really easy to access. Greek mythology is harder.
But I know, that challenge, and even just when you’re speaking with someone, sometimes you don’t want it to be heard and you don’t want the audience to feel upset that they’re not hearing. So, the level that has to be is really specific for them, not to feel that they’re missing out. And then when you say something you want them to hear, that that is really big.
Sam Booth:
You want the people at the back to hear it, but you can’t be too loud, so that it sounds like you’re acting – projecting.
Miranda Mac Letten:
I think for all of us, and it’s a skill I will never stop honing, its that ability to get in and out of abstract. And I will constantly keep improvising to make that better. And understanding the vehicles that can allow you to go from something really realistic into a more abstract world, and how to get back out of it without it feeling jarring. The best performers in this show are the ones that can do that seamlessly. But it’s a never-ending challenge.
Sam Booth:
And how much emotion to display. If you’re too clearly telling everyone what you’re feeling, then it stops being interesting, because it stops being real. And the audience aren’t guessing anymore.
Kat McGarr:
I never try and show anything. Just try and feel it, really.
Sam Booth:
Yeah. But then you think “Are they getting it?” Because you’re trying to tell the story.
Kat McGarr:
I think for me, the truth is always the same. In terms of truth, of narrative, or the emotional beats of whatever scene is, the truth is always the same. But there may be an energetic shift in how you show it.
Miranda Mac Letten:
We can all indulge, though. Sometimes, if you’re having a really emotional day and then suddenly the tears come really easily, and you spend a whole loop crying. And actually, it’s not very interesting to watch a person cry for a whole loop. The moment that’s interesting is, like, just before they go, or like, the fact they try not to, but you might just be having a really indulgent day where you’re like, I’m feeling it, so it’s going out. I know sometimes I have to pull myself back from, like, the most glorious Oscar winning moment, but actually it’s really boring. I’ve seen too much of it.
Kat McGarr:
And that’s where, like… yeah, I meant as an actor not as a person.
Miranda Mac Letten:
I mean, that’s the challenge that I have often.
voidspace:
There was a conversation somewhere the other day about jump scares in the show and I was like, that’s kind of more haunt attraction, less Punchdrunk, as far as I’m concerned. But, like, that’s just my opinion.
Miranda Mac Letten:
In lots of early shows, we always had a walk of terror.
Sam Booth:
Peruvian Michael…
Kat Mcgarr:
Yeah, it’s how you do it, though, isn’t it?
Miranda Mac Letten:
Back on [previous Punchdrunk show] Malfi, I used to just hang back, and I’d lose everyone because it was dark. And then, as they passed in front of me, I’d just walked towards someone and hug them really tight, and every time it would make someone scream. Every time!
Kat McGarr:
People jump and when I go to hit Polymestor with the mirror…
Miranda Mac Letten:
Ooh that one’s the worst!
Miranda Mac Letten:
Fania [Grigoriou, who also plays Hecuba] gets a really good jump from the audience. She picks up a saucepan and goes [raises arm] and Luba stops her.
Kat McGarr:
I do that one.
Miranda Mac Letten:
Do you get that one as well? [laughs]
voidspace:
I love that moment. Literally, I jump every time that happens. But it’s about moderating it, though, isn’t it? Because, like, one of those moments in an otherwise quite subtle scene is going to be impactful, but if you’re turning it up to eleven all the time, then it’s just going to get a bit…
Kat McGarr:
And you know what? You really have to gauge how your loop has gone, rhythmically. If you’ve given something somewhere that’s slightly different to how you would usually, then you have to tone it down in other places, just so that the balance is constantly moving up and down. And it’s not just like Miranda said, you’re not just playing it here [holds hand flat in the middle of an imaginary gauge]. So, it does mean that you’re emoting in different ways at different times at different things, that you might have played differently the day before.
voidspace:
It’s interesting that it changes every time, though.
Sam Booth:
We’re moderating the pitch, and the intensity…
Kat McGarr:
…all the time.
Sam Booth:
Which can be done in a one-on-one as well, obviously, in response to the energy of the audience member. That’s interaction, because you’re bouncing off the audience as well. The way that they’re attending to what you’re doing. That is interactive theatre.
voidspace:
How do you work that out? How do you learn? That kind of responsiveness in the one-on-ones, and even, it sounds like, in your general loops, that you’re picking up on the energy of the audience and matching what they’re doing.
Miranda Mac Letten:
That’s live performance.
Sam Booth:
We can all do that. Anyone can do that. That’s just human awareness. That’s common sense, human sensitivity.
Kat McGarr:
And you can tell when you’ve got an audience, what they’re interested in, actually. So sometimes they’ll be really interested in something that in the last loop, the audience were not interested in. So that really changes your flow.
Miranda Mac Letten:
Yeah, all the audience have internal rhythms, too, and you start to read everything. Some people are really moving. They can’t keep still. Some people are scared stiff, so they’re really still. Some people are very calm, and you can feel that they’re calm and that you’re going to be able to manoeuvre them easily. You just start learning. The minute you touch someone, you feel whether they’re like this person [startles], or whether they’re [relaxed motion], and they’re going to go with you. This is nonverbal communication we’ve learnt. You just get better at reading it.
Sam Booth:
We’re all doing that all the time in life, unless we’re completely detached from each other, and interacting on screens all day. But when we’re interacting with each other as humans, we’re all picking up those signals all the time. Make an offer, see how that’s received. Response. Respond to the response.
Miranda Mac Letten:
They create their own characters, too. There’s that thing about the rhythms of the main three characters in the scenes. You have a still person who’s really centred. They tend to be like high status – be like Clytemnestra or Hades, high status. Then got dreamers that are all floaty and off balance, and you’ve got the jokers, the nearer people who tend to play with their rhythms a little bit, which is really funny, because then they become characters in the scene because of their own natural internal rhythm.
voidspace:
My last question: what advice do you have for people who want to become creators in this sort of space?
Miranda Mac Letten:
Just do it.
Kat McGarr:
Just do it, yeah. Someone asked me this recently and I found it really hard to answer them, really, because for me, I’ve been with Punchdrunk since I was a student, so it’s been 20 years now. I don’t know what I would say to someone getting into it now, other than how I have gotten into other areas of the industry. And it’s just by interacting with the companies that are doing it, whether it’s going to see them, whether it’s offering your services as a volunteer or an intern or wherever, but also really just by doing it yourself. Even if it’s small scale, if it’s just one room or it’s an interactive video. There are so many mediums that we can do interactive performance on now.
Miranda Mac Letten:
People that just…they’ve seen everything, they know everything, yet they’ve done nothing. Just be brave. Put something out there if you need to.
Kat McGarr:
And that’s how you learn, by doing it. We’re still learning, always.
Sam Booth:
That’s right. Follow your enthusiasms as much as possible. Follow your obsessions and the things that really fire you up. I think Punchdrunk’s success is based a lot on Felix making shows that he genuinely would like to see himself, putting himself in the audience’s shoes all the time and having that at the centre of his thinking. True enthusiasm and childlike wonder, that has fuelled these shows.
Kat McGarr:
Yeah. And when you’re making interactive work, you’re always thinking about the audience, how you want them to feel. That’s a big part. Even in the more interactive stuff that I do – sometimes I’m so silly because I want them to lose their inhibitions so that they come on the ride.
Miranda Mac Letten:
And I think with immersive it’s really important to have great inspirational texts that you’re starting from. To really love your starting points and to understand them and what they’re going to bring.
Kat McGarr:
Get inspired. I made a show, I went back to where I studied at St Mary’s, which is where I met Punchdrunk 20 years ago, and made a show with the final year students from scratch. And I had to educate them on how to generate material. And it is by pulling images that inspire you, whatever they are. Watching ‘arty’ directors that maybe aren’t mainstream so that they offer a broader kind of more artistic viewpoint. We fill our creation process with images, really interesting images, to recreate or be inspired by.
Miranda Mac Letten:
They don’t always have to be read, either.
Sam Booth:
It’s very easy to second guess the audience, and go, “This is what people will go for”. If you’re consciously putting the audience at the centre of your work, you think, “Oh yeah, this is what the audience will like”. But if it’s not you, if you’re not using yourself as a yardstick, then you’re envisaging this kind of phantom audience out there, that is unreliable. I think that’s how you end up missing the target, thinking: “This is what people will like”. Then you can end up with something that nobody really likes.
Miranda Mac Letten:
Because these obscure texts come from Felix’s love. Nobody wants to watch Metropolis. I can screenshot every scene and be like “That’s beautiful” but I don’t want to sit through the whole thing.
Sam Booth:
Horses for courses!
voidspace:
I like Metropolis!
Miranda Mac Letten:
I love I how much it is influenced this show. But I’m glad it’s not the only influence.
Kat McGarr:
It’s always developing, because you’re always going back to the source text or you suddenly hear something that you say, or you see something you haven’t seen before. You read a line, you’re like, “How did I miss that before?” Yeah, I’m going to use that.
voidspace:
It’s great that you had the freedom to do that as well because that’s quite different from conventional theatre, where once it’s set, it’s there.
Sam Booth:
It doesn’t matter what you’re basing it on, it could be based on anything, but it’s useful that it’s based on something so that we’re all on the same wavelength as much as possible.
Kat McGarr:
Yeah, absolutely. There has to be a framework, for when you’re devising anything. You have to have some frame, whatever that is. It can change as you realise that “oh, no, actually this has developed into this” a week further. But yeah, you have to have a good start.
Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City runs until 24 September 2023
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