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[0:00] Gordon Cox: As the artistic director of the immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, he is the director and designer of "Sleep No More," the globally successful show that played a major part in the rising popularity of immersive theatre over the last 15 years. "Sleep No More" may have closed in New York earlier this year, after a run of 14 years, but now Barrett and Punchdrunk are back with "Viola's Room." It's an intimate experience for one to six viewers at a time, who remove their shoes and walk barefoot through a labyrinth-like installation inspired by a 1901 short story called "The Moonslave." There are no live actors in the show, but the recorded voice of Helena Bonham Carter tells the story through headphones, as audience members follow thousands of intricately timed lighting cues from a castle to a hedge maze to a suburban 1990s bedroom.

"Viola's Room" is now playing at The Shed in New York through October 19th, and Barrett is in the virtual studio with me to talk backstage secrets, 90s nostalgia, and how he's taking inspiration for some of the new theatre he's making from video games. Hi, Felix. Thanks for joining me.

[1:35] Felix Barrett: Hi, Gordon. So nice to be with you.

[1:38] Gordon Cox: So Punchdrunk is best known here in the States and probably around the world for "Sleep No More," which is large scale and large cast. It's sort of huge in many senses, and "Viola's Room" is a very different experience. How do you describe it to people when people ask you about it?

[2:00] Felix Barrett: Well, for me, I think "Viola's Room" is almost the most distilled form of Punchdrunk in that it's got a full DNA of wanting to sort of pull people into a magical world and they forget the land outside. But we really wanted to try and do something that was the most intimate show possible. So I think it's got all of the secrets and potency that we really compressed it to try and create something that really gets under the skin and, you know, that really is a sort of a living fever dream. So even though it's much smaller in scale, I actually think it increases the impact. So hopefully, people who enjoy "Sleep No More" will love this.

[2:44] Gordon Cox: Has that been something that you have been missing or wanting to try to explore more after experiences with shows like "Sleep No More"? Is that sense of intimacy and that sense of, you know, kind of more, not quite one-on-one, but a real sense of connection?

[3:01] Felix Barrett: Yeah, I think, actually, it's interesting you point out the one-on-one. I think, like, within the big shows like "Sleep No More," you know, the one-on-ones are the sort of most experiential, the sort of most coveted sort of moments, secrets to find.

[3:20] Gordon Cox: Yeah, we should say for people who might not know what that is, or maybe didn't get a chance to see "Sleep No More," there are moments in "Sleep No More" where certain audience members are sort of pulled aside, and they have an experience, often just one person with one other actor. And it is, as you say, coveted because it only happens to a few of us, and the rest of us are left out.

[3:37] Felix Barrett: Yeah, and it was, you know, often it's a room that's been previously locked, and you only ever see what's on the inside if you're one of the chosen ones. But those moments are so cinematic and so sort of, you know, experiential is an overused word, but it's like it's a proper sensory full wash because of proximity and because of the sense that no one else is getting it. So actually, it's a privilege that with "Viola's Room," it's almost taking that principle and stretching, and the whole show is basically like an extended one-on-one. It's actually, you know, one-on-six. So six audience get to have their own adventure, which, but it's all living in the sort of high adrenaline atmosphere that comes with real intimacy.

[4:29] Gordon Cox: It also allows for a sort of linear narrative in a way that I think the structure of something like "Sleep No More" does. Would you agree with that in terms of a story that is being told that you can guide us through step by step in a different way than people kind of choosing their own path through something like "Sleep No More"?

[4:48] Felix Barrett: Yeah. So I think, you know, "Sleep No More" was always designed to be a sort of almost like a gallery experience where you can pick and choose, and even though there's a story at the core of it, it's really designed to be taken in whatever order you desire. But with "Viola's Room," I was really craving a linear narrative. I wanted to create something which actually has a beginning, middle, end, and actually we're holding the hand of the audience, and it's far more structured in that way, and I think it means we're able to craft more of a crescendo. So it's been a really great departure in the way we're traveling as a company now.

[5:27] Gordon Cox: Where do you put it in terms of what its genre is? Is it theater? Is it installation? Is it immersive? How do you do?

[5:36] Felix Barrett: It's really hard to sort of… I think I'm always trying to create work that slightly sits outside of descriptors because my ambition, I mean, the whole word Punchdrunk comes from the idea, you know, that when a box is hit and just before they hit the surface of the mat, they're seeing stars and they're transported, and it's almost like time slows down. And so the goal is to create work and give audiences that feeling. In terms of how I would describe this, it's a really good one. I suppose it's, I would say it's an adventure, but it's probably, yeah, it's installation. It's like, you know, it's, I would say, I'd hope I had, yeah, it's right. You've stumbled me.

[6:25] Gordon Cox: What do you think of the term immersive theater, which is so often associated with Punchdrunk's work? Is that a fair descriptor of what you do? Do you feel like that works?

[6:34] Felix Barrett: What's so interesting is like when we first started, we're 25 years old as a company this year, which is crazy thoughts. But when we started, I used to call it, describe us as installation-based, site-sympathetic theater company, quite verbose, not very pithy. And then the word immersive sort of was actually created by the media around sort of, you know, around 2007. And so we've sort of become, been pulled into that term. But what's interesting is that the word is so overly used now, like almost anything can be immersive, but I'm not sure it really has much meaning anymore. Certainly it means different things to different folks, and it's become a catch-all. So certainly I think what we're trying to do is like, is create something which where an audience are plunged into another world where you're submersed in an atmosphere.

So we want you to be able to, you know, forget about your life beyond, you know, forget about the streets of New York City and the transport and the heat and everything to get here. Once you're there, you almost decompress into a completely another space. And once you're there, you know, that's all you can think about. And I think, so that's, yeah. So then that way, immersion is certainly something we're striving for. It's interesting. I think we're in a sort of place where it became so sort of overused as a term. I think there's a new vocabulary going to come in because I feel like we're in the sort of second epoch of experiential work. But it will have to be, you know, you and others, journalists who are going to have to create a new term for that.

[8:20] Gordon Cox: I'll start brainstorming. Yeah, I'll get on that. As you mentioned, Punchdrunk is 25 years old. "Viola's Room" existed many years ago, 20 plus years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about that early version and what made you interested in revisiting it?

[8:33] Felix Barrett: Yeah. So in the first few months of Punchdrunk, you know, when I was just graduated from college, I was doing a series of theatrical experiments, one of which was putting audiences in masks and letting them explore big empty buildings and telling nonlinear narrative. But a few months later, I did a different experiment, which is putting an audience member in headphones and actually a narrator guides you through a story. And then you discover that you're becoming the protagonist. And so we did a really early version of "Viola's Room" in the year 2000. Only four audiences ever saw it. And it was actually one of the things I'm probably most proud of because it was pretty crazy in that our four audiences were invited individually, if you came by yourself, to a small theatre that was in the southwest of the UK, really small, 200 seats, which I'd rented, built a set on the stage, programs on all of the chairs.

They came by themselves. There was no one there, not a steward, not an usher, not a performer, no one. I did worry and think they might up and leave, but no, they spread out and then they waited. The show time began and a phone started ringing on the stage. They got up onto the stage. There's a parcel addressed to them. Unwrapped it. Inside is a cell phone. Your driver's waiting outside. They then went into the car park and there's a solitary car with a masked chauffeur. And they got in the back of the car. A soundtrack began and the show ignited. And then we drove them to an old derelict mansion house, a vast 70-room dilapidated mansion with 13 acres of walled Victorian garden, but completely overgrown.

There's now a forest. And then they got dropped off, given headphones, and then all they could do was follow a series of burning torches that led into the depths of the forest and built little installations that they would come across as Viola in the story does herself. It was amazing to behold.

[10:55] Felix Barrett: The impact of just having a voice in your ear and all you can do is be pulled forwards by the light and you can't really go back because otherwise you'd get lost. There's an inevitability of an amazing, dreamy pull. It felt really incredible to see the impact on those four audiences and always wanted to come back, but we could never quite work out how to realise it again. It was only when we realised, oh my gosh, actually, if we build the world and make it interior, suddenly it becomes feasible. It's incredible that it's taken 25 years to actually come back to it and properly scale it up, but it's been a big ambition for us as a company to actually realise it fully. It is based on a 1901 short story by Barry Payne called The Moonslave. Can you tell us a little bit about why you were interested in that story and what that story is about, and then what you think this new version that you are telling is about?

[12:02] Gordon Cox: Yeah, so the original version, I think I'm very much into the gothic and the literary gothic as a sort of genre because there's a sort of romance, there's a nostalgia, there's a dreamy, heady quality to it that really sort of chimes with our work. This Barry Payne short story was this amazing sort of tale of a girl on the cusp of adulthood and a sort of coming of age story masquerading as a fairy tale. A princess became obsessed with the moon and it had an epic romance and a really distilled sort of crescendo as she meets her inevitable demise. It was perfect for an outdoor show 25 years ago played in October in the dead of night with the full moon. But coming back to it, as with all gothic work, sometimes it can be slightly one note.

So we realised we wanted to bring on the incredible Daisy Johnson to actually give a contemporary reimagining of it and just to her sort of incredible visceral sort of earthy language and just to actually see it through a different lens and give it a bit more depth and elasticity. So yeah, the Barry Payne language is quite fusty and something for 1910, it feels it. And we want something that would just trip off the tongue of our amazing performer, Helena.

[13:58] Felix Barrett: Yes, this is Helena Bonham Carter, who reads the story to you in your ears as you were following through the path. Was she also involved in your work with Daisy? Can you tell us a little bit about how you imagined then the world of the piece, the physical world that you're living in, and where you start? You start very surprisingly and delightfully in a location that I was not expecting. I just wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that conceptual overlay that you've mapped onto the piece.

[14:29] Gordon Cox: Yeah, I think a real driver for me as a maker is to take the audience out of context and put them somewhere they're not expecting. One of my favourite novels is Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, where a protagonist walks the same street for decades and never looks at it properly. And then one day, he actually realises that all of a sudden he's walking past a tiny little door that has a tiny little plaque above it saying, a magic theatre for madmen only. And he goes inside and he can never be ready for what he finds on the other side, this incredible labyrinth. And that almost speaks as a sort of metaphor for everything we're trying to do. So because it's a gothic tale, I knew I wanted to offset it and be able to flip it so that we destabilise the audience and to give it more texture.

And so putting it through the eyes of a 90s kid. And so yes, we got to basically live the dream and rebuild. Actually, my brother's sort of 90s bedroom complete with all of the sort of ephemera and posters and CDs that he had. And so Spin It for Viola. But that becomes, you know, the piece is very much about the cusp of adulthood and that sort of amazing, magical, liminal time when you're not quite an adult and not quite a child. And so precious. It's so ephemeral, it's brief, it's everything is possible. And imagination is huge. And so that becomes the sort of catalyst. And that's the starting point for the tale. And then you slip inside her dream.

[16:11] Felix Barrett: Yeah. For those of us of the correct generation, I am one of them. To whom Tori Amos and Massive Attack were hugely important in the 90s. It's very satisfying to hear because it really informs the whole soundscape of the piece, right? And the music that you're drawing from. It's as much a love letter to the 90s music as it is to the Gothic tradition. This is a piece that's about nostalgia and there's a magical thing when you're a child, you have experienced awe and wonder and the likes of which you can't really do as an adult because we sort of suppress those tendencies. And this show is about sort of unleashing it and actually, you know, experiencing things for the first time again. I'll have more with Felix right after this break. And now here's more of my conversation with the artistic director of Punchdrunk, Felix Barrett.

[17:11] Felix Barrett: There are no live actors in the show. I did not see anyone last night walking through it that was not, you know, with my group. How much of the experience, if you're willing to take us behind the scenes a little bit, how much of that experience, because I should say that timed to the audio are these extremely elaborate, many, many, like thousands, right? Light cues that happen throughout the show. How much of that is automated and carefully timed that way? And how many people are there behind the scenes making sure everything goes smoothly?

[17:50] Felix Barrett: There's a big team. It's the smoke and mirrors of, you know, you feel completely almost desolate and empty with just the six of you exploring and adventuring, but it's technically quite complicated because it's got as many shows as any cues as a big Broadway show. It's just all done in sort of micro. Simon Wilkinson is our amazing lighting designer, even sourced a light bulb that's smaller than LED. It's called a grain of barley. And so we're operating on a sort of almost a molecular level and playing with sort of almost pure darkness to allow the imagination to fill it and allow your paranoia to creep up on you and tap you on the shoulder. But yeah, so there's a big team. And, you know, I think with all of our work, there's a sort of we have a duty of care so that we want you to experience a sort of a quickened heart rate and a sense of that sort of intrepid nervousness about not knowing what's around the corner.

But we want you to feel protected and safe as well. So there's a lot of sort of measures where we're looking after you, but we want you to just teeter into that place where that magical twilight zone where it feels a little borderline dangerous, but not too much. But to do that safely, there's a big backend.

[19:11] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And how much does the timing of I just was curious about how automated those cues could be in terms of what I'm hearing because it was so precisely timed, but then there's always the potential for somebody getting off, I would imagine.

[19:28] Felix Barrett: Yeah. I mean, that's the way we've had to do it. It's actually, you know, it's like we do all shows. It's all time coded so that it's meticulously choreographed. None of it's being cued. It's all automated. And so if an audience member, when we're sort of, you know, when we're taking it, it's how do you like gently guide an audience without telling them what to do? How do you encourage them so they feel like they're making discoveries for themselves without them getting lost within it? It's a fine balance and we don't always succeed.

[20:02] Gordon Cox: Another important element that we haven't talked about yet is that you're walking through this show barefoot and you are feeling a variety of textures under your feet along the way. Tell us about that. Why that was important.

[20:13] Felix Barrett: Yeah, I think it's a massive thing for me is, you know, the five senses, you know, how do you highlight each one and how do you storytell with that sense? You know, sensory deprivation is such an amazing tool when you sort of shut off your other four senses and you just focus on one. It amplifies and suddenly it becomes this rich, versatile tool. And we're not doing taste, I should say, but scent, smell, obviously.

[20:45] Gordon Cox: There are scents. There's an olfactory journey to this as well.

[20:49] Felix Barrett: There's an olfactory journey. The whole thing is auditory because, you know, you have Helena Bonham Carter's incredible voice. Like we always imagined actually her lips are on your ear. She's that close to you. But when it came to touch, touch is a really underutilized sense in the theatre. And we knew we wanted to really lean into it. And there's a way that just with our hands or if there's an opt-in that you can decide whether to touch or not. Whereas if your feet, there's inevitability. There's a sense that you have to, you get pulled in because in order to move forwards, the surfaces will change. And so it adds to the dreamlike quality. And it's been amazing that we just do those tests on how can a different surface, what does that give sensorially? What does it give atmospherically? How does it recontextualize a scene, a moment, a feeling? And it became a sort of beautiful tool that, yeah, it's been amazing.

[21:51] Felix Barrett: Heady, dreamy quality. Also, I love the fact that it kind of feels quite childlike. I look at my kids, and they never wear shoes. I'm just running around. As an adult, to be in a beautiful gallery here at the Shed, but with bare feet, you feel slightly invulnerable and childlike, which adds to the whole essence of the piece. I hope it was amazingly liberating for the audience to actually do that and to explore all the secrets with that sense that anything could shift underfoot at any point. It's an elaborate sort of installation, but I imagine it is a thing that you could reconstruct anywhere else in the world, like some of your other shows, as you've done. I think it's amazing that it played 14 years here. And it's still in Shanghai, is that right?

[22:52] Felix Barrett: Still in Shanghai. It's opening in South Korea in August. Which is crazy. That's a step up for it. That's even bigger, I read. It's kind of crazy. There are future productions in the pipeline in other places. But I think that they take ages to do it. You get a big space. It's a big build. It's a big commitment. There's a lot to it. Only big cities can really sustain those sorts of shows. We were really excited to try and get to places. I love new audiences who've never seen our work because they're the most fertile minds because they really don't know what to expect. So the hope was with this that the Violet's Room could maybe reach some of those places that we couldn't do a larger scale show in. And it's exciting to have a first thing that potentially tour and actually get out there. So it's great to be bringing it here first.

[23:59] Gordon Cox: And in addition to Violet's Room, you recently made your directorial debut in a traditional proscenium theatre with Paranormal Activity, which is a stage adaptation of the Blumhouse horror movie. Tell us a little bit about that.

[24:13] Felix Barrett: That was last year in Leeds. That was last year. It's opening in Chicago in the fall and then doing a little mini tour, but not coming here yet, although I sincerely hope it does. But that was my side hustle. I think sometimes, as an artist, you always need to sort of stretch, keep your muscles working and exercised. And my worst nightmare would be to sort of stagnate and just start repeating myself. So when it came up, I was like, oh my gosh, actually, that would be such an incredible challenge to try and create something in a traditional theatre that is truly frightening to its core. And the discipline needed to work within a proscenium, I kind of loved it.

[25:06] Gordon Cox: Did you find that you were able to draw from tools that you have honed over the years with Punchdrunk in creating, as you said, because the spookiness is a part of all of your work, I think. And so I imagine that there are moments in Paranormal Activity that even though they're in a proscenium, still feel very Punchdrunk in a way.

[25:29] Felix Barrett: Yeah, definitely. I think with any work, you're sculpting the peaks and troughs and the emotional arc of it. But I think in terms of particularly Punchdrunk things, knowing the power of, again, sensory deprivation and actually highlighting one of the senses and really amplifying that. Actually, Gareth Fry, who is the superstar sound designer of Violet's Room, also did Paranormal with me. So actually, a lot of the sound bed of that is actually what generates the abject, the fear. And yeah, even though it's traditional, I still think I'm drawing on some of the tools in my toolkit for how to destabilize the audience and actually suddenly make them paranoid that not everything they're seeing is as it should be.

[26:22] Gordon Cox: And what's coming next for Punchdrunk?

[26:25] Felix Barrett: Well, we've got things that are announced. We're doing a new musical in Shanghai based on a Netflix TV show, Arcane.

[26:39] Gordon Cox: This is Arcane. Yeah, let's see for folks who maybe might not know what that is. That is an animated TV show that was very successful on Netflix, and it is based on a multiplayer online battle. It's a video game, basically, a long-running, very successful video game franchise.

[27:00] Felix Barrett: Yes, and that's amazing because I think actually doing a musical, a promenade musical, is thrilling. The music's amazing, and that'll be next level, like multi-space, Sleep No More with music.

[27:17] Gordon Cox: And is it an adaptation of the story of that TV show or set in the same world?

[27:25] Felix Barrett: Yeah, so it tells the story of the TV show, which charts two sisters who live in an amazing sort of underground city, and it's the story of their relationship with their father figure, and they sort of rise up against forces of magic. It's actually epic, and the artistry of the animation is incredible. I can't recommend it enough. So the idea of actually staging something which has the poetry of animation with big sort of chunky, anthemic music sung live whilst an audience is promenading is fraught with many challenges, but that, if we can pull off, and it feels great so far, it's going to be next level. Dustville and musicals are something I'm very much leaning into.

[28:22] Gordon Cox: Yeah. I also feel like there is some overlap with video game narrative design with some of the things that you do in your work, right, in terms of how you lead a viewer or a player through a space with design and lighting and sound. I feel like there's a real overlap there in terms of the tools you use.

[28:46] Felix Barrett: Yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right, and I've long been fascinated by video game mechanics. In fact, going back to the word immersive, it comes from video games. That's where the vocabulary was pinched from to describe this raft of life work, but actually, video games are the most immersive form because the audience member has so much agency and has the ability to craft, control, to actually do whatever they want inside these alternate worlds. I'm convinced that the future of immersive theatre is going to be, actually, the more that we take from video games and apply it to live action because that is really getting lost in something. If you could create something where the audience member has real control of what they do, how they do it, the agency you have in a AAA adventure game is probably my big target over the coming years.

[30:02] Felix Barrett: Certainly, we are in active, active work to try and start prototyping that and introduce a new form, which is the real fusion of theatre and gaming. As a kid, going back to nostalgia, I would watch movies and then imagine what it'd be like to be inside those films, but looking at my kids, they have a different relationship with video games. They play the games and then they hypothesize what it'd be like to be inside Zelda or Fortnite, and that, I think, is my artistic destiny over the coming years, is to really try and push that because it feels like it's untapped potential. We've been scratching at the surface of it indirectly. I really want to go direct and actually, rather than an audience being there as passive watching or there to follow the story, what happens when the audience become players? That is also coming soon.

[31:12] Gordon Cox: Is there a timeline for Arcane?

[31:14] Felix Barrett: Yeah, Arcane opens in November.

[31:18] Gordon Cox: Okay, so very soon. You're going from Paranormal Activity to Arcane.

[31:26] Felix Barrett: Yeah, it's quite complicated. It's a juggle. It's a deliciously busy, busy period, but I think it's kind of amazing. Yeah, I wouldn't have it any other way. Also, it's quite exciting because there's such a different variety of shows. They're all very unique.

[31:40] Gordon Cox: Well, we can't wait to see what comes next. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me, Felix. It was great to speak with you.

[31:46] Felix Barrett: Oh, thank you so much, Gordon.

[31:48] Gordon Cox: That was Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, whose latest show, Viola's Room, is now playing at The Shed in New York through October 19th.