A Long-Awaited War: ‘The Burnt City’ (The NoPro Review)

Punchdrunk fans have been begging for a new full-scale production since The Drowned Man closed in 2014. Sleep No More’s ongoing run in New York City and its more recent mounting in Shanghai has left the production company’s homeland bereft of its own semi-permanent Mecca for the better part of a decade, almost as long as the siege of Troy itself. Now that the gates have opened on The Burnt City, the old guard and new recruits alike are answering the rallying cry and descending upon the London neighborhood of Woolwich in droves.

And what awaits them there, on the banks of the Thames beside the old arsenal and armament factories, on land built on the pillars of cannons and stacks of munitions?

Nothing less than a monumental adventure through a mythic war.

Veterans of Punchdrunk shows have come to expect a certain standard of living: close to a hundred luxuriously detailed rooms and spaces to explore while the narrative plays out throughout the environment. But it’d be a very seasoned wardog indeed who isn’t staggered at the sheer vastness of The Burnt City — not only is the scale and scope at times dizzying, but it’s possible to actually fail to discover half the set if one doesn’t make the right turn or take the correct staircase (the show is wheelchair-accessible, however one still would need to find and take the proper elevators to cover the whole landscape).

Guests are welcomed to the facility with Punchdrunk’s signature white domino masks and black velvet maze designed to disorient and mesmerize, this time as a series of gallery rooms displaying artifacts and plot points related to the Trojan War. The characters and storyline are laid out in these spaces but it’s prudent to mention that in the excitement and the numbers of audience members within this space, it’s easy to accidentally miss or not retain these details. As in common Punchdrunk fashion the characters don’t have many spoken lines (though there is some more spoken word in this script than in previous work). A sharp visitor might wish to pre-study the Wikipedia summaries of Euripedes’ Hecuba and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon before arriving just to have an idea of the narrative, but even without the research there’s nothing inaccessible about the enthralling visuals of the choreography once let loose in the main set.

And such choreography: thanks to the bones of the facility having such high ceilings, movements are increasingly more vertical as well as horizontal — aerial and rope work, ladders, stacks of props all serve as ways to lift the cast up out of the crowd, solving the endemic issue of giving an incidental crowd a good view as the characters traverse the cities of Troy and Mycenae. A cast of between twenty to thirty scatter the audience across the buildings with dozens on dozens of scenes both intimate and expansive.

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The cities — characters in and of themselves. Filled out with masterful strokes of light, scent, props, and razor-sharp music design (there’s little to no sound bleed between rooms, so spatial transitions are immediate and full), the audience journey down into the murky depths is meditative: trance-like through a mad carnival, wandering the smoking gloam between the two armies à la Apocalypse Now. If one manages to break free of the gravitational pull toward the neon glow of the large built-up town squares, shops, clubs, and arcades, wallowing in the pits of the military encampment as well as the dilapidated hotel and tenements yields the best appreciation for design detail. Usually we withdraw from filth, from garbage, from the debilitating emptiness of hoarders suffocating caves, and yet within The Burnt City we gleefully squeeze between stacks of dirty tin cans and forests of yellowing laundry to go rifling through cabinets and drawers, reading private letters and prayers and finding graffiti scrawled in Linear B.

Punchdrunk isn’t famous for its audience agency; there are no real choices to make as the narrative unfolds the same way (in hour-long loops over the course of three hours) regardless of if anyone is there to witness a scene. But the industry-famous one-on-one experiences are present: every now and again a lucky guest is ushered into a private space where they experience a piece of the story which no one else is present for. So while there are no real choices to make apart from deciding where to go, where to stand, and which direction to look in, the revisit value remains high as there’s no way to see everything in one, two, or even five or more visits.

Given the physical scale of The Burnt City, early entrants may indeed begin to feel the three hours on their feet — in a space so huge, traversing the cities feels like a soldier’s transcontinental march; comfortable footwear is a necessity. And while it remains an enforced requirement to wear a face covering under the domino mask, this isn’t really a show for the Covid-concerned: it simply isn’t possible to maintain social distance and not touch anything (though there are sanitiser gel stands surreptitiously placed around). Visits are recommended only for those with an adventurous spirit, the keen desire to go looking for the action, and a brazen willingness to abandon their companions at the first hint of excitement.

There’s a reason Punchdrunk is one of the kings in the immersive realm. Though it’s true that no monarch is infallible (for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of universal audience appeal), the crown here is earned: whatever tarnish and bloodstains might eke out between the filigree, it’s indisputable that they reign over beautiful lands. May The Burnt City stand for years to come as a testament to its origins as well as its current status and scale:

Epic.

The Burnt City is now booking through December 4, 2022 at One Cartridge Place Woolwich, London SE18 6ZR. Tickets start at £78.50. Rush tickets are £25.

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