Inside Troy, at Punchdrunk’s immersive experience The Burnt City

Punchdrunk is an award-winning immersive theatre company that transforms warehouses into enormous and elaborate sets, which audiences can freely walk around. And as they do, a play unfolds around them and with them. Here, the audience is not separate from the action but a part of it. And because of that, the similarities between Punchdrunk's shows and video games are many.

Here, Alan Wen and Bertie talk about their separate experiences of Punchdrunk's latest production, inspired by the fall of Troy - The Burnt City. The show is running in London until the end of September.

Bertie: It's been a few weeks since I went to The Burnt City. I remember there being a bitingly cold wind whipping around the Woolwich Arsenal in London when we were there. I'm still thinking about the show. And I'm keen to know how much you knew about Punchdrunk before you went? What were you expecting?

Alan: So that was my first ever visit to a Punchdrunk production but I used to have an interest in theatre and I remember friends telling me about Punchdrunk way back in the early noughties. But the idea of promenade/immersive theatre was what I had in my mind when reading about certain games having a theatrical quality to them, which sounds like a weird analogy if, like me, your experience of theatre had mostly been the cheap seats high up in the balcony in the West End.

Bertie: Okay! It was my first experience of Punchdrunk too. But I'd heard about the group before. I'd heard about it from friends who'd seen Punchdrunk's Sleep No More show in New York, and, I'll be frank, the experience sounded terrifying! A dark warehouse where everyone wore masks and was split up to wander alone through it, and have what sounded like quite an intense, and intensely personal, experience. How did you feel going in? I remember a definite sense of nervous excitement in the queue when we were there. Were you apprehensive?

Alan: I was quite into the idea of wearing masks (fortunately they were designed so that they could fit around glasses), because it becomes your avatar into that world without also breaking the immersion, right? You're trying to experience these performances but without being distracted by the fact there are also other people in the same space, and who the performers are also trying to pretend aren't there - at least in the moments people don't accidentally get in each other's way, physically. I hear there are also one-on-one performances that occur, though that didn't happen for me. Also, the space is just so darkly lit, it's like wandering through a dungeon.

Bertie: I liked the masks too - I thought they helped separate audience from performer and add a sense of protective anonymity, because it can be quite daunting standing face-to-face with a performer in the dark, or even watching them as they're very close by.

But to the show itself! What did you think? Because as you mentioned above, there's an inherent video game-ness to it all - this idea that you're walking around an environment that's alive, a kind of simulated world, really. And you can go anywhere you want and follow anyone you want. There was this moment I was edging down a dark hallway in a hotel, completely alone, wondering what I was going to find on the other side of the doors I was passing - or what was going to come bursting out of them. It wasn't a comfortable experience but it was a powerful one, and I was overwhelmed by how like a game it was. Did you get a sense of that?

Alan: I certainly went in with a mentality of what kind of games I would be thinking about. Initially, I thought this might be the equivalent of a walking sim, but the difference there is that you're actively interacting with the environment or puzzles to trigger an event, whereas here the performances are happening in real-time whether you're there or not. You could wander into a seemingly abandoned area and just have a seat to yourself and then suddenly someone dances in (because most of the performances were essentially wordless choreography) and that space becomes a scene. And there's just all sorts of directions you can be taken in. I didn't even discover Troy until the second half!

How did you go about experiencing it? Were you led on by a specific actor or by just where the rest of the crowd was going, or by a sound or light that suddenly caught your attention?

Bertie: So I purposely broke from the group I was with and went in the opposite direction, into a kind of Chinatown, with lanterns hanging from shop windows and tight, winding alleys, and the moment I turned the corner, two actors came at me and climbed the wall right next to my head - I had to jump quickly aside. I couldn't have gotten closer to the action if I'd tried.

Incidentally, I loved how commanding the performers were when outlining the space they needed and where they needed to go. They move at a kind of 75-percent speed, a stylised speed, which gives everyone time to react, and they clearly point out where they're going to go.

But as to who I followed: I followed a whim. To begin with I was simply doing the opposite to everyone else, because I'm that person, I suppose. I'd see troupes of 'masks' dutifully following characters around me, like an invisible pack of ghosts hovering around one of the living, and I'd go the other way. I pushed at the edges and tried to find something all of my own - I nudged doors, walked down hallways. It was creepy! But eventually I got tired of it and found myself upstairs in a huge room with a huge table and, I think, with the gods, who were having a shower for some reason, and I followed a few of them from there.

But it took me ages to get my bearings and a sense of what the areas were and how they were linked. It's like a warren in there.

Alan: Did you try to interact with any objects in the rooms? I was quite nervous about touching anything, in case one of the staff members clad in black and standing ominously at the edges of the set suddenly swooped in to tell me off. But I did wonder whether there was any actual interactive element that would make it more game-like.

Bertie: It felt like they were encouraging this quite a lot, both from what they told us before we went in and in the myriad carefully crafted objects there were to look at. I've never seen sets so intricately populated. But like you, I was reluctant to mess with them.

Some people weren't, though! When I was in that hotel hallway, I opened one of the doors to find two people lying on a caged bed and someone running a metal cup across the bars, as if they were in a prison. It was such a bizarre scene! It seemed like something choreographed for the show but it wasn't - these were masked audience members! And they froze and looked at me when I walked in. I think I did a very quick reverse manoeuvre and walked out.

Did you come upon anything bizarre?

Alan: Nothing quite like that, though I did recall I was getting a bit knackered towards the last hour and got lost trying to find my way back to the bar. When I got there it was a bizarre surprise to find that the area had also transformed into a performance space where you had a band (along with the gods, I think) performing 80s pop covers like ‘Blue Monday' and ‘Sweet Dreams'!

Bertie: You know, you've hit upon a common theme there: tiredness. It's a long show and you weren't the only one tired out by it - by a combination of trying to work out what was going on and just being on your feet the whole time. It's why almost all of the characters seem to lead you into the bar at some point, so you can have a sit down. And it's why there's so much going on in the bar too - a lot of the characters did a stint on the bar stage, making the entire area feel like part of the show.

I think breathing room like this is why the show is designed as a kind of dance, as well, so it can be repeated and looped, and so people can dip in and out and not feel tethered to certain scenes or storylines. You're much freer then to both explore and interpret things your way, rather than be told what's going on.

On that point: what did you make of the story and the storylines - were you able to follow what was going on? Because I'm going to be blunt with you: I didn't have a clue.

Alan: Oh yeah, it didn't make a narrative lick of sense to me! I have some passing knowledge of the Trojan Wars but I honestly didn't know when I was seeing characters who were mortals or gods. I suppose it didn't help that when I went in, I somehow missed a big display showing you all the characters and actors with their family tree and origins, which would've helped!

Still, I admired how the art direction took all kinds of inspirations: you had the Cold War-style checkpoints between Troy and Mycenae; Troy itself had that kind of Weimar art deco decadence; even that big stone table, which might have been the closest to being classical, also had a bit of sci-fi-ness to its use of lights. I thought that was interesting, because when you first go in, you see displays of Ancient Greek pottery - a more traditional presentation of these events - before it goes completely leftfield. It's something theatre generally does well, staging its stories in different contexts and taking inspirations from other eras and styles, rather than films or games where there's always an emphasis on 'authenticity'.

Incidentally, was the finale you saw in that big hangar-like space below where the stone table was? I definitely felt like I was being led there, but then I also heard there are in fact multiple endings. Really it's impossible to experience everything in just one visit, it really does want you to revisit multiple times, I guess a bit like a choice-based narrative game with multiple paths!

But in terms of game parallels, I think the game experience I ended up comparing with it most was Immortality, again a totally different kind of game, but in the sense that your curiosity would lead you from one scene to another and then to another. Not quite as instant as a magical match-cut obviously, but still the same sense that the more you experience, the more you'd supposedly piece together what the hell is going on.

Bertie: The finale was in that big hangar-like space below the stone table - yep. Although, there was what felt like another ending in the Underworld, modelled as a piazza, moments before.

And yeah, it's definitely built for repeat viewings. There's nothing obvious or overt about the story it tells, except from at the end - there's a definite crescendo you can feel. Even people who are familiar with the story of Troy will find they're spending a lot of time working out who's who and what specifically is going on. I believe they rotate the cast each performance, too, to intentionally jumble things up. So not knowing what's going on is exactly the effect I think the show is supposed to have, because it's that grasping for understanding that pulls you closer and makes you remember and discuss for days and weeks to come.

And there's plenty to talk about, as you can see here - not least because it's one of the most dazzling and audacious productions - purely from a production values point of view - that I've ever seen. An entire warehouse dressed with staggering detail. It's an unforgettable experience.

The question is, would you go back - would you see a Punchdrunk show again?

Alan: I wouldn't mind seeing The Burnt City again to be honest! It might have been jumping in the deep end, not having been to any kind of theatre for years, but I've got a taste for something similar now.

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