THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH
BAC,
London SW11
Opened 2 October, 2007
****
After being praised to the rafters for their Faust in a disused East End archive
building last year, the Punchdrunk company was given the brief of
creating another site-responsive production to use every available
space in BAC. Since this consists of the former Battersea Town Hall,
now converted into an arts centre with three regular venues and at
least one sizeable hall to spare, that's quite a set of premises to
play with. Punchdrunk succeed in immersing the entire building in such
an unwonted atmosphere that even I, who have known the place for nearly
20 years, found myself wandering around like an innocent. For that is
the structure of this presentation, which is an impressionistic collage
of several of Edgar Allan Poe's stories rather than anything resembling
a linear drama. We are kitted out in carnival masks (many of us also
adopt capes) and instructed not to speak during the evening, then left
to our own devices to discover what we will.
What I discovered were a series of chambers dressed in phenomenal
detail, whether as bedrooms (any of several women seen at various
points may have been intended to be the cataleptic Madeline Usher, or
Berenice, or Ligeia – Poe's women are largely interchangeable in any
case), studies, a crumbling garret or a morgue that converted within a
few minutes into a banqueting hall. Performers, usually singly or in
pairs, engage in brief scenes too unspecific for me to identify with
confidence any particular tales, but all contributing to the Poe-esque
atmosphere of wrongness of mind and body. A bar area is provided for
refuge, disguised as a palace of varieties in which nudge-nudge musical
numbers alternate with an impressive and disturbing mind-reading act.
Among the features I missed (so I gather) were a ravishing perfumery, a
real live black cat and a sensuous blindfolded one-on-one encounter. It
must be said that after all this, the finale of Prince Prospero's ball
and the arrival of the Red Death felt rather anti-climactic; apart from
an admirable final illusion, the company's fevered danse macabre seemed contrived and
unsurprising. But the air of communal celebration on our unmasking was
genuine. Too often the phrase "journey of discovery" is hollow and
meaningless when applied to art; here, it is accurate in every sense.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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