Punchdrunk while 7.5 months pregnant

So we went to the theatre on Sunday evening and it was a Punchdrunk production - this time, the Drowned Man.*

I'd been to two Punchdrunk productions before (Faust and the Mask of the Red Death), both while living in London, and neither with an extra couple of stone attached to my front. I was slightly apprehensive about how I'd manage a three-hour promenade performance with a long journey home afterwards, but I was fine (upon purchase of a large chocolate bar at the end, anyway). I managed to locate the toilets quickly and the bar had glasses and jugs of tap water on hand at all times.

For those that have never been, it's a surreal experience. You can either choose to follow the main acts or you can split off and follow your heart. Sometimes an actor parts from the main group and runs away, with whole segments of audience members (all in masks) following at a quick tempo. This was not an option for me this time, as there was no way I was keeping up, especially as the whole thing was over four floors. Instead, I generally wandered on my own, not even spotting my man until about half an hour from the end.

The whole thing was more surreal than usual, given some of the key themes were madness, loss of reality, desperation, fear and anxiety. Usually (previously) I have had my own odd and special experiences and this time was no different.

In the medical room, where I found (upon reading some medical reports lying on the table) that one of the key characters had depression, the doctor found me and stared at me a while, before shining a torch on my large belly. He then touched my belly - with some reverence - before leading me to 'someone very important'. We eventually found ourselves in a forest, large trees around, woodchip on the floor, watching a performance in a gazebo. He (very respectfully) slow danced with me, before pointing out a blonde woman (one of the key characters) and telling me that I should keep an eye on her, as she was falling apart, acting scenes, rather than living her life. I had previously watched an odd scene in a diner, where she was working, where she acted out a scene that a man brought in on a clipboard, rather than seeming to have any free will of her own.

My second odd experience was with a woman in a long black veil. She'd been part of a scene on a floor covered with sand, dimly lit, rows of straw people sitting in chairs, a dead world. When she left the scene, I followed her and, after she had unlocked an invisible door, she held her hand out to me. She ended up telling me a story about a little girl who had been afraid of the light and had sought out the moon...until eventually the light had died and the world with it. About an hour later, when I returned to this floor, she put a small scroll in my hand with the symbol of Ankh written on it, which I thought was rather appropriate in light of the new life within me.

Each of the floors held incredible detail - the woodchip floor had an area of caravans, each full of information, letters, belonging to each of the characters, that gave away a little bit more of their story. There was the sandy floor, with rooms full of studies - the Bible, engineering, electronics - a church in which the woman in the black veil resided. A floor with a bar, a toy shop, a diner, a water fountain in the main square. And finally, the basement, a place of madness, full of shrines to dead people, a room full of dead sunflowers and what was clearly some kind of ritual sacrifice room. I can't remember which floor it was on, but I also found a psychiatrist's room, where the desk was full of reports on all the actors and their various states of madness (some with simple depression, other with hallucinations and on a cocktail of prescribed drugs). Then there was the floor with salt deposits and the actors' dressing rooms, crumbling ash covering some of the rooms...another dying world. There was so much in this created world, that it's impossible to list it all (and would, no doubt, be terribly boring!). I'm convinced, if I were to return, that I would see many unfamiliar rooms and scenes.

It was an excellent performance, with incredible attention to detail within the set, as usual, and the three hours flew by, with me barely noticing how tired I was getting.

If you can get to it, I highly recommend it. Well worth it, especially if you (want to) challenge your own fears and wander off on your own, seeking out your own experiences.



* Synopsis from the National Theatre website:

The award-winning Punchdrunk stage their biggest and most ambitious production yet. The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable is an extraordinary theatrical adventure: a unique personal journey which unfolds across four levels of a vast central London location.

Amidst the fading glamour of 1960s Los Angeles, stands Temple Studios – a crumbling monument to the golden age of film, seducing wide-eyed dreamers with the promise of wealth and fame. Here, movie stars mingle with hungry young upstarts, while beyond the gates lies a forgotten hinterland where the many rejected by the studio system scratch out a living.

Inspired by Georg Büchner's fractured masterpiece Woyzeck, The Drowned Man explores the darkness of the Hollywood dream. Celluloid fantasy meets desperate reality, and certainty dissolves into a hallucinatory world.