Viola’s Room

Follow the Light

Viola’s Room

by Daisy Johnson, conceived by Felix Barrett, based on The Moon Slave by Barry Pain

Punchdrunk at One Cartridge Place, Woolwich until 15^th September

Review by Patrick Shorrock

Punchdrunk break all the rules of conventional theatre, not simply removing the fourth wall but nuking the entire auditorium.  The audience wanders through a vast elaborately decorated maze in the hope of locating some dramatic action.  On a bad day it can be a bit like popping into Ikea for some tea lights and then not being able to find the exit.  It’s a combination of the mesmerising, worrying, and frustrating, as those who came to the Burnt City, Punchdrunk’s last installation, based on the Trojan War, will know. 

This time, the result is on a smaller scale – the show is only an hour long – and rather more focussed.  We are directed through an installation in groups of six.  We are barefoot and in complete darkness except when the lights come on and show us where to go next, as we listen to Helena Bonham Carter’s narration on our headphones.  As there is only one way to go through the installation, there isn’t that anxiety about missing something that rather spoiled my enjoyment of the Burnt City.  Instead, you have to negotiate your way through total darkness and strange rooms and wardrobes full of clothes never sure where you will end up next as you wait to follow the lights.  You wander along passages, enter a teenage girl’s bedroom, fight your way through curtains obstructing winding passages, and gaze enraptured at tiny models of trees and castles with windows that light up in line with the story. 

As an experience in its own right, it is astonishing, intense, and rather scary.  You suddenly start empathising with all those poor girls in films who are chased down dark corridors with by a psychopath with a chainsaw, even if the worst that happens is when you accidentally bump into someone during one of the dark bits.  (There are lots of extremely helpful staff on hand if needed.)

It’s a not exactly original, somewhat gothic, story about a young girl on the threshold of sexual awakening – Angela Carter meets the Red Shoes – but immense care has been taken with every detail of  the telling including  the design (Casey Jay Andrews) lighting (Simon Wilkinson) and sound (Gareth Fry).  There are nevertheless some strange inconsistencies, which I suspect are deliberate alienation: Viola is a princess who lives in a huge palace and about to marry a prince, but her bedroom with its cutting of Catwoman pasted to the wall and advertisement for a Tori Amos concert is like an ordinary teenage girl’s.  The narration tells us that music stops but the music simply continues until we are told that it starts up again.  We enter a chapel and are only told minutes later that Viola has entered it. 

There is a feeling that all this trouble and ingenuity is disproportionate for the commonplace story we are told.  It’s rather like one of those cupcakes where the icing is twice as high as the actual cake: messy to eat and leaving you with a sugar high but still hungry, even if it was deliciously naughty at the time. 

Patrick Shorrock, June 2024

Photography by Julian Abrahms