In my short break I also travelled to London for the first time in a while (apart from an overnight stay last year on the way to Le Guess Who). I was only there for three days but it was pretty action packed. On the night of my arrival I went with friend C— to Cafe Oto to see a performance by John Butcher, Chris Corsano, & Florian Stoffner, respectively playing saxophone, drums, and guitar. Corsano was the one here with whom I had previous, as I remember seeing him in Dublin some time back when he might have been based in Glasgow.
I have in the past suggested that the boundary between jazz and improv is defined by the skills of the musicians, but this concert rather challenged that assumption, as it did seem to be billed as essentially improv despite the astonishing chops of the performers. Corsano's charismatic playing attracted considerable attention, which is not too surprising given how great it always is to see a topnotch drummer really go for it, but the others all deserved top marks, with Stoffner's guitar textures and Butcher's sax all worthy of praise.
The next day I went out to see Strawberry Hill, the gothic revival mansion Horace Walpole had built for himself in the late 18th century. In his lifetime Walpole was a noted man of letters and minor Whig politician, but there days he is most famous as the author of The Castle of Otranto, a faux mediaeval narrative that conjured the gothic novel into being. If you've never read it then I can reveal that it is a hoot; few books begin with a key character crushed to death by a giant helmet falling from the sky, which gives something of a taste of how the novel progresses. The house has an endearingly crazy quality to it, with funny little turrets and internal ornamentation that makes you imagine ghosts stepping out of portraits or phantoms appearing from behind hidden panels. It's an intriguing spot and well worth a visit.
That evening saw me travel out to Woolwich for what was the main driver of my trip to London: attendance with C— at the performance of The Burnt City, a piece of immersive promenade theatre served up by the Punchdrunk theatre company. This work was based on the Trojan War. In case readers are wondering, "immersive promenade theatre" means that instead of sitting on a chair and watching actors do stuff on stage, the audience wanders around the performance space, occasionally encountering the actors doing their stuff, with cast members identifiable because unlike the audience they are not wearing masks. Because the space is big and things are happening simultaneously, audience members will have unique experiences. It also means that the order in which people encounter scenes can be a bit random, which will disrupt more usual notions of narrative flow. Punchdrunk shows also use lighting and music to great effect.
This was my second Punchdrunk show, the previous one being The Drowned Man, which I now realise I saw in London almost ten years ago. That was to some extent inspired by Georg Büchner's Woyzeck but it also drew heavily on Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust and had a Dark Hollywood vibe to it, with the sets evoking a vague kind of Americana that felt like it was from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps a bit earlier or later. Oddly, the staging of The Burnt City was quite similar, with the audience arriving initially into the Troy part of the set, which instead of feeling like something from antiquity evoked more the atmosphere of a 1930s film set with its cheap hotels, business premises, and pokey homes. The Greece (or Mycenae) part of the complex was a bit more abstract, with more in the way of large open spaces (but all still indoors and generally shrouded in darkness except when they weren't). And it is probably worth noting that although billed as theatre, the event was heavily dance based, with I think no actual dialogue spoken by the cast but a lot of movement.
And did I like it? Well it did make for an engaging evening but I think maybe I was a bit underwhelmed. I'm not 100% sure why that was. It might be that having previously seen another Punchdrunk show, this one did not have the shock of the new. But it might also be the nature of the performance. The Drowned Man had Dark Hollywood themes and a 1930s-1940s setting, but despite its Bronze Age setting, The Burnt City also had a 1930s-1940s feel to it. I think also that greater familiarity with the source material might have paradoxically made me enjoy the show less. With The Drowned Man, I had at that time no familiarity with Woyzeck or Day of the Locust, so I was approaching it with a blank slate, experiencing scenes from first principles in an impressionistic manner (I enjoyed reading The Day of the Locust some years later and recognising scenes from the show in it). But Greek myths and the Trojan War are things I have been familiar with for a long time. That meant that when I found anything happening in front of me I was trying to work out which bit of the Trojan myth I was watching instead of just letting the show wash over me.
What I did like was the bar. C— and I had a drink before we went into the show proper and then in the middle I came back for a cocktail break, cursing the fact that we had not pre-agreed a time for an interval drink together (you basically lose your friends in the show so you won't have a chance to day "Drink?" to them in there). Aside from the expensive cocktails, there was music from a band reminiscent of the synthpoppers in La-La-Land (the best music in the film I seem to recall) and a cabaret show tenuously linked to the Greek myths. At one point I was handed a spotlight I then had to keep on the performer, which is the kind of audience participation I am down with.
All in all an interesting and broadly enjoyable evening, but I would have to think a bit before I went to any further Punchdrunk shows.
