Punchdrunk is the company that put immersive theatre on the map. Since it was founded more than a quarter of a century ago, it has built a reputation for creating vast, intricate, freeflowing productions in which masked audience-members are allowed to roam freely through its spaces. Hits include The Drowned Man (2013), Sleep No More (2003, although best known for its 2011 revival in New York) and The Burnt City (2022), all of which place dozens of actors and hundreds of audience members in aircraft hangar-sized spaces in which stories are wordlessly performed in a thousand fragments, often through the medium of dance.
Since Punchdrunk moved into its new space in Woolwich, however, it has had a chance to experiment with smaller productions, starting with the interactive narrative experience Viola’s Room. This was followed up by Lander 23, in which teams of four players take part in what feels like a real-world video game, in which points are scored for achieving objectives and lives can be lost if you’re caught by NPC enemies. It’s a thrilling experience, sharing the hand-crafted environment of the larger productions but injecting enough adrenaline into the experience that you find yourself cowering behind its props rather than examining them.
I caught up with Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett to ask about the new direction and his future plans. Lander 23 feels like a video game – was that the intention? As soon as you give audience agency, then you’re in the realm of gaming.
The word ‘immersive’ actually comes from video games. Immersion is about being completely in the world that’s been designed for you. When I look at my kids today, the main form of art they consume is video games and interactive media.
I grew up watching films thinking, ‘What would my live action equivalent be?’ For the generation beneath my kids, they’re gonna say, ‘What’s the live action equivalent of a video game?’ That’s been really playing on my mind and Lander 23 is the first step along that journey of interrogation. A Lander 23 player at Punchdrunk’s Woolwich theatre I wasn’t overtly inspired by video games but they’re a huge part of my life. I remember being a teenager, watching my mate play Resident Evil and just thinking, ‘This is so crazy, it’s like a film, but it’s interactive’.
So I think it’s always been part of our DNA. In Sleep No More, there are loads of unlockable spaces. If you can unlock them, then you get secret content – that’s a gaming mechanic.
What we wanted to do with Lander is make that more bespoke, more tailored to the individual. Give audiences more jeopardy, give them lives that they can lose. What happens when you apply all the amazing mechanics we know from video games to a real-world story?
In the playground, kids have the most incredibly euphoric time just playing tag or 40:40. We realised it comes down to there being jeopardy, where you could be caught. It’s about experiencing that element of danger in a safe way.
The world itself is so dangerous that it’s nice to have a place where it’s safe to feel that danger. We need an outlet and as adults, we very rarely get a chance to flex those muscles, because we’ve learned to suppress them. Does the three life rule mean people might miss out?
Very rarely because as with all video games, we can bend the mechanics, so you would have to be either terrible or very disruptive. We know that sometimes people can get over excited and we don’t want to penalise those people – but you do need some mechanics to protect the experience. How much will Lander 23 evolve?
This is just the first iteration, we’re going back into development in early May and we’re going to add a tonne more game mechanics and narrative and automation. We’ve learned so much doing this. You can see why some video games just stay in development forever!
Punchdrunk’s narrative production Viola’s Room Do you think you’ll offer more narrative-driven experiences in the future? Story and characters are things that are yet to come in a future iteration of Lander. What we won’t do is let the audience control the narrative.
Breath of the Wild is my idea of gaming perfection. It’s huge but from the start of the game, you know you need to get to the castle and save Zelda. There were myriad paths to get there, but the goal is the same.
That’s my eventual goal. What are some other Punchdrunk influences? When I was a teenager, at the Trocadero up in town there was an Alien experience.
Never went to it but I’ve heard so much about it. There was a sequence where the people taking part were in a lift. A hatch above them opened and one of the audience – who turns out to have been an actor in disguise – is dragged away by an Alien.
That idea blew my mind. In the film Aliens there’s an amazing scene where they board a drop ship to go down to the surface of the planet and Lander was almost called Drop Ship in tribute to that. There’s also Robert Wilson, this great American theatre director, who recently passed, who wa