Felix Barrett: Behind the Mask with Punchdrunk

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of The Future of StoryTelling. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to the FoST Podcast. When you think of immersive theater, you most likely think of Punchdrunk. Called, “World-conquering theater rebels,” by The Evening Standard, and, “Hands down, the best immersive theater company in the world,” by Time Out, Punchdrunk is at the forefront of the movement to give audiences experiences that are active, multisensorial, and altogether completely unlike anything conventional theater offers. Their pioneering productions dissolve the line between audience and stage, creating an experience where it feels like anything is possible. With record-breaking and critically acclaimed shows in cities from New York to London to Shanghai, Punchdrunk is shaping the new face of theater on a global stage.

Charlie Melcher:

Given Punchdrunk’s incredible success and influence, it’s a privilege to have the creative force behind it all, Felix Barrett, on today’s podcast. Celebrated as a visionary who reinvented theater by The Guardian and others, Felix conceived, designed and directed all of Punchdrunk’s site-sympathetic shows. I’ve gotten to be friends with Felix over the years, so I’ve asked him to give us a special journey through their iconic show, Sleep No More. He’s going to walk us through the making of the experience from start to finish and at every step give us a peek behind the curtain, into the creative process that resulted in this landmark production. We’re in for a treat, so let’s get started. Please join me in welcoming Felix Barrett.

Charlie Melcher:

Felix Barrett, it is such an honor to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast. Thank you for being here.

Felix Barrett:

Oh Charlie, it’s an absolute pleasure to be with you.

Charlie Melcher:

So I have to start by letting people know that the very first evening of the Future of StoryTelling Summit when we were having our VIP special dinner, we were doing it on the top of the McKittrick Hotel and then took 120-some odd people down into Sleep No More for a night that they will never forget. All of us were just blown away by that experience, and that was literally the first FoST thing.

Felix Barrett:

Wow.

Charlie Melcher:

And we owe that to you. It was incredible memory. I should also say I am a very proud member of your board and an investor in Punchdrunk.

Felix Barrett:

You sure are.

Charlie Melcher:

And I am because I am so moved. I’m also maybe your biggest fan. I am somebody who thinks that what you’ve done is just brilliant and sort of changed the world, certainly the world of theater and immersive experience. I mean, Sleep No More is one of those pieces that is… It’s in the canon. It’s like one of the most important pieces in the world of immersive experience. I’d love to learn more about how it came about. Where did you come up with that idea? What’s the story of this immersive theater piece, Sleep No More?

Felix Barrett:

Well, I think it all goes back to actually my days at university and doing a drama degree, but being a frustrated filmmaker. And I’d been disillusioned with theater, yet studying it and trying to find the ways you could break the rules of it. Because I was going to see shows and thinking that actually it’s all quite elitist and theater seems for the cast and the directors, but often the audience, the guys who were paying the money on the way in, were being forgotten about. And back in the days of Elizabethan theater, if you weren’t enjoying it, you can throw cabbages at the performers and leave in a huff. And it felt like, that’s fair enough because they’re the ones who are buying the seats. It felt like I was going to see shows where I found them stiflingly awkward, but you have to endure it because I didn’t want to disrupt the etiquette of theater.

Felix Barrett:

And I should say I love conventional theater, but I just wanted to see where else it could go. How could you make it dangerous in the way that I felt it was when I was a kid? So I did a number of experiments at university. And it wasn’t until my finals when I took over a disused territorial army barracks and I finally getting to play with how you could disrupt and break that rule set. And took the play, Woyzeck, bit of German expressionism, and set it across this beautiful space which was completely encroached with nature. Dilapidated and so much ivy had grown inside this building that it made tunnels of it. Lit it with candles, spread the action around the building, and then realized, oh my gosh, it’s not going to work. Well, how are the audience going to know who’s performing and who isn’t and how they’re going to know where to go or know where the show is?

Felix Barrett:

And two days before we opened, has an epiphany, and one morning thought, oh my gosh, if we put the audience in masks, suddenly they become part of the sonography. They disappear from view. It becomes theater for one audience member with a cast of 12, and it becomes their own adventure. And that was the experiment put on. Went to my local art department, Thomas University, and pressed the masks myself. Cut them out, tried it out for one night, and thought it was just going to be another experiment as part of my degree. But had some really interesting feedback. And people were sort of like, “Wow, that was kind of crazy.” I found I wasn’t myself. My personality shifted. I had impulses that I wouldn’t normally have at the theater and just carried on making experiments.

Charlie Melcher:

What is that experience that people have when they have that mask on? What do you think is happening?

Felix Barrett:

I think it’s interesting. It actually does relate to the lack of seats. So I think what I was frustrated was with conventional theater is not what I was seeing, but the experience of going to the theater, picking up your tickets, going to find your seat, sitting down, people rushing in, waiting for the lights to go down. It was so formulaic that it actually puts you in a place of relaxation because it’s very predictable and always the same and thus makes the audience very passive. That’s fine and it’s great, but it means that only a sort of certain chunk of your brain, the intellectual, the cerebral is active to watch the show. And I wanted to make a theater whereby the body’s active. You’re physically present, you’ve got adrenaline, which means that all your synapses fire up and your senses are in overload, receiving. And what happens when you’re telling a story of that instinctual place, that visceral place rather the intellectual place.

Felix Barrett:

So to do that, remove the seats so they don’t sit down. All the rituals of going to the theater we took out. The mask is almost the equivalent to the theater seat because without the mask, it would just be absolute pandemonium with people running around in spaces and you wouldn’t be able to know what’s going on and we’d lose control of the show. It would run away with itself. So by putting on a mask, it’s the equivalent of sitting back in your theater chair. It delineates you as audience, but it also makes you invisible because it hides your features and it means that the entire audience look the same. So you’re protected by the anonymity and it empowers you to maybe be more brave to come out of yourself or to maybe follow instincts that you wouldn’t do normally because you are anonymous.

Charlie Melcher:

I also had never thought about it, but your masks have always been white and the lighting’s often low. So the differentiation of height and body type and clothing kind of recedes into the shadows while the white mask is the thing that you see. And that’s identical for every person. So everyone’s exactly the same ghost.

Felix Barrett:

Absolutely. It’s almost like the theater tickets is inherently elitist. The wealthy sit near the front and those who don’t sit further at the back and have a worse time. And it’s like I’m trying to break those rules, create a meritocracy, give it back to the audience where if they’re curious… The old adage that we have in Sleep No More is the more curious you are, the more you’re going to discover. Fortune favors the bold. And actually when we first started it was a Jacques Lecoq Neutral Mask, which was devised as the most neutral mask possible, which meant that if you put it on your physicality would determine your character. So if you’re slouched or slightly intrepid, you would exaggerate your… The mask would embody that and you would look nervous. But if your body is sort of forthright and you’re open and warm and you’re presenting that the mask would then in turn sort of smile and look confident. And so we were really in the early days, taking the idea that the audience were almost the chorus, the idea you could shift and mold and a shape-shifting crowd.

Charlie Melcher:

And of course they’re there to bear witness, but they’re also not allowed to speak. Right?

Felix Barrett:

Yeah.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s one of the other rules that you established.

Felix Barrett:

That was very important from day one is that the mask had to cover the mouth, so that we didn’t want any chatting. We wanted a level of decorum where you’d be lost in the dream. And the idea of people getting distracted and waking up from it was just always a disaster. And actually over the years, the mask has shifted because it wasn’t very breathable when we first had it. It was almost a death mask. And so over the years it’s now evolved and it’s now got almost a beak which people think is Venetian, but it’s purely come from practicality and as having something that’s comfortable to wear whilst as neutral as possible.

Charlie Melcher:

Okay, so let’s go back to the story of creating Sleep No More show. You told us about some of the early experiments and then how did actually Sleep No More come about?

Felix Barrett:

So prior to Sleep No More, I was trying to find other like-minded theater makers in London. Trying to find people who were interested in rule breaking. And I managed to find one piece that was happening in London, which was happening in a disused master ship builder, Ship Price Palace. And it was a dance piece because of all of the sort of technical and experiential progress was coming out of the contemporary dance world. And it was the last night. So I rang up saying, “Can I come and see it? I want to see this and meet other people that are making work out of theaters.” And they said, “Well, I’m afraid it’s totally sold out.” I said, “But please, please let me in. I just need to meet everyone, and I’d love to see the show. It sounds amazing.” And they said, “We’re absolutely sold out. Don’t even bother turning up.”

Felix Barrett:

But they said, “But if you are making this stuff, we’re running a competition at the moment. And if that closes on…” This is Saturday and it closes on Monday. And they said, “If you were looking for ideas for dance shows, if you submit an idea, if it wins, you’ll get a producer and we’ll help you find the money and put it on.” So I thought, what can I do? And I quickly got out my grandfather’s typewriter and wrote down the idea of telling the story of Macbeth as a Hitchcock thriller, but all of Shakespeare’s language transposed to that of a contemporary dance. Anyway, so I wrote that.

Felix Barrett:

And I thought also it’s so atmospheric. How do I convey that? So rather just send it in on an email, this is why I’d use the typewriter, I then got the typewritten bit of presentation, folded up, put it in a sort of brown manila envelope, put it in my grandfather’s old dinner suit in a breast pocket, put that suit inside an old leather suitcase, put some mothballs in, a few props, and dropped off the suitcase at the doorstep of the people running the competition. Just making sure I’ll be noticed. Say, “Hi, look at me.” I’m just terrible. Luckily it got picked and-

Charlie Melcher:

It won.

Felix Barrett:

It won. And what’s crazy is that then we got a brilliant producer, Colin Marsh, who then said, “We’re going to make this. Get a little bit of money.” At the time, it felt like a huge amount of cash. And together we started to unpack the show and we put it on for two weeks in an old school building in South London. And we were really… We were almost beyond the fringe. We were so… We were almost like underground art installation scene. I remember on the last day 100 people came to see it and it sort of snowballed from 20 to sort gradually grown. We couldn’t believe that so many people had come.

Charlie Melcher:

So what I’d love to do is to ask you to take us through the experience. So if someone gets a ticket to Sleep No More, they’ve heard that they should go do this thing, what’s the first thing they receive? How do they enter into this experience?

Felix Barrett:

Well, ideally the first thing is you don’t know much about it. So I want audience to already feel a bit wobbly about where they are. They’re actually checking themselves going, “Is this the right street? Am I in the right place?” And then as you approach the building, there really isn’t any signage. It’s like the opposite. We’re trying to do the opposite to theater. Rather than being up in lights, it’s anonymous. And then as you enter, it’s about the unknown. So it’s the nothing’s telling you about how to do it, you don’t really know. It’s always about there’s not quite enough light so you can see everything.

Felix Barrett:

So you are already having to switch on your other senses. Your sense of hearing should pick up. Your sense of touch should pick up. And then you’re taken upstairs. And then the first thing you go into, you hear a sort of Phil Noir soundtrack. And so it almost is like the opening credits to a movie. And then you go into almost pitch black maze because it’s about sensory deprivation. It’s about really tuning you to the tone of the piece. So we call it the decompression chamber, but it’s taking you out of the world of New York City and into the world of the show. And then you find yourself coming out of that into a bar in the 1930s and you’ve passed over to a dream world.

Charlie Melcher:

Now, somewhere in there you were given a mask. No?

Felix Barrett:

Not yet.

Charlie Melcher:

Not yet. Okay. Sorry.

Felix Barrett:

That hasn’t happened. So what’s so interesting, I think it’s like maybe I’m laboring this because I think with this sort of work, if you start it immediately, if something is experiential… And I think it’s interesting now there’s loads of other immersive shows everywhere. And the one thing that’s very important to us is that it’s a slow burn in. And we’ve tried shows before where the audience just walk straight in, get a mask, and they go. And it doesn’t work at all. They’re in the wrong head space and they’ve got a sort of en energy that’s not simpatico with the show.

Felix Barrett:

So with this, the show takes about sort of 15 minutes to gradually pull you under. It’s almost like you’re being submerged within the mood of the show. So you enter this bar, it’s like a halfway house where you’re, “Is it present day? Is it the ’30s?” You can buy a cocktail, the pace of life is slowed down. You get taken into a back room. And so you’ll be plunging deeper and deeper. There, they give you a mask and then herd you into an elevator. And in that elevator, that’s where the show starts. You’re told the rules of the show, which are basically from this point on, you’re on your own. And then the audience has scattered across six floors of building and it begins.

Charlie Melcher:

And when you say scattered, I remember I went once with my wife and we were pushed out on different floors. I mean literally I thought we could do the whole thing together and we were being let out and I stepped out and they stopped her and she had to go to a different floor.

Felix Barrett:

That is a really important thing. We’re trying to sort of explain without telling, but it’s better if you go by yourself because we wanted you to be empowered as an individual and you can have a much better time if you go and follow your own instincts, explore the building in your own time, follow the characters you want to see, and then come back and meet your wife at the bar at the end and share your stories. Because the whole thing has got 30 characters that are all… Their narratives are playing simultaneously, so it’s impossible to watch in one sitting. So it’s almost a singular experience that becomes cumulative when you retell it after the show’s finished.

Charlie Melcher:

Interesting. So interesting. So I’m going to take us back into the building now. And let’s say we’ve just been pushed out of the elevator and we’re alone. We’re hidden behind our mask. We’ve got our cloak of invisibility on, and we start to explore. And what are you trying to have happen now for your guest?

Felix Barrett:

Wow, it’s almost as though from this point on, you are free to go wherever you want to go. And we absolutely don’t tell you what to do. It’s about 80,000 square feet with about 100 rooms, six floors, 80% of it is pure darkness. And so you could almost follow the light, but there’s an awful lot you can’t see, which means your imagination is filling in the gaps. And I think it should feel sort of part fairytale, part movie, part sort of fever dream. And as soon as you are spat out at the elevator, you’ve probably got four or five choices of where you go. You can follow the crowds, you can break away from the crowd. It’s designed so that the points where you really will look around and realize you’re by yourself. Because essentially it’s almost like a gallery experience. It’s like an installation art piece, but with live performers.

Felix Barrett:

And it’s fascinating watching audience’s behavior. You get a chunk of audience who will go straight in and try and find the lead narrative. They know their Shakespeare and find Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. And you get another type of audience who actually avoid the crowds and that big story, I’m one of these, and actually explore the space. And actually if the crowd goes one way, you step into the dark corridor that no one’s gone down. So that’s another tier of characters there. You’ll get the sort of more peripheral resident characters who maybe don’t have as big a role to play in the Shakespeare but in our world have just as much to offer. And that’s where the secrets lie.

Felix Barrett:

But you can literally there, you can almost let the design or the light or the sound guide you. And any one of those will take your hand and lead you through. And then equally, a huge group of audience, like a third of the audience, who are like, “What is this?” And feel a bit sort of overwhelmed by the atmosphere and want to go back and find the bar, get a cocktail, sit down, watch the band. And that’s completely valid too. And they’re still in the world and it’s still part of the show. So it’s really for the audience to choose their own adventure and pick their route through the building. And none of them are the wrong answer. They’re all right.

Charlie Melcher:

And when you say go through the building, one of the things that’s just so incredible is the set design and the level of detail. I mean these are cinematic quality sets, but three-dimensional, and you’re free to touch anything and open drawers. And I just remember feeling like the world building component was just as essential as anything else, if not more so. It was almost a character. A lot of the feeling of the experience and memory of the experience came from the way you felt in the rooms. Temperature, smell, light, what you’re walking on, what you’re interacting with. Talk about the world building.

Felix Barrett:

I think you’ve nailed it there with what it feels like. That is, again, going back to a conventional play, is you have an intellectual response to what’s happening on stage. With this, I want you to have a sort of visceral response to what you’re feeling at every given space. So in every room we’re trying to trigger all of the… Well, at least the four senses, if not the fifth, with taste as well in some places. So that you’re getting it at every angle. And so we want a living, breathing world, which actually maybe it’s like the definition of the word immersive, I think, is debatable and different people are using it indifferent ways. But certainly for us it’s want it to be a world so thick that it’s almost, you’re lost in the dream of it and nothing will wake you out of it.

Felix Barrett:

So in terms of the design, everything’s touch real. If you can touch it, there’s a walled garden outside the Macbeth’s bedroom. It’s real bricks. Actually, the floor sags in that space with the weight of it. But if it were fake, you’d realize it was all artifice and it would have no meaning, but it has to be real. So when you trace your fingertips across it as the performers do, you’ll get the brick dust in your fingernails and it’s about that tactile real experience that just sort of means that you roll with it. Nothing’s reminding you that you’re actually in New York. You can lose yourself and be in Scotland for those three hours. But the aesthetic as what you see. But as important as what you see is what you don’t see. Sort of gaffer tape and the sort of building blocks of theater, all of that is hidden. And even the lighting we try and sort of pull into the world. So you are as lost in it as we can humanly push you.

Charlie Melcher:

So some people are exploring the rooms and just the maze of the building and others are following the actors. And so talk about what’s happening with the actors.

Felix Barrett:

So firstly, we call them performers because they’re actually sort of a hybrid of some of the world’s best contemporary dancers. That’s their training. But often you don’t see them dancing, you just see them. There’s no language. So they’re just living the narrative as if it were real. Completely oblivious to the audience. So you might have one performer who’s in a room packing up their belongings and there might be 50 audience in there, but for that performer they’ll think they’re alone. And yet there are characters which are supernatural or there are characters who are drugged. There are characters, actually, who are actually dead. Poor Banquo’s ghost. Those characters can then see the audience are on the same plane as them, are aware of them. Can look them in the eye and even lean into them and touch them.

Felix Barrett:

And that’s where the sort of theatrical language splits. If you’ve come across a witch, suddenly they can look you back in the eye. And that’s where the real fun begins because then they might become aware of your presence, reach out their hand, and if you choose to put your hand in theirs, they will take you away from the huddle of the crowd and to a door that’s been locked this entire time that no one’s been inside. Take the key from around their neck, unlock it, and you get taken in and you get your own secret micro scene, what we call the 101.

Charlie Melcher:

First of all, I just think it’s so powerful that it’s a dance piece. That the story is being told through physical gesture, through bodies. Most people think of theater as, frankly, primarily, the dialogue, what’s spoken. And yet here you’re using this form that predates spoken language. Is there a reason you think that immersive theater seems to have this connection to dance?

Felix Barrett:

Well, I think it goes back to the empowerment again. And if it’s a physical language, it’s open to interpretation. Which means as an audience member you use your imagination. You’re more invested in it. You’re layering in your own life experience and it suddenly becomes really specific to you because it’s through your own filter. With language, it could be more on the nose, and that’s the nature of language is it has precision. But there’s something that’s really direct about a physicality in the same way that music can transcend any language, doesn’t matter. It can be translated. It just touches you. It’s the same with gesture. Whereas any language needs to be processed through the sort of logical part of the brain. I suppose it’s, yeah, whether you’re using the right-hand side or the left-hand side of your brain.

Charlie Melcher:

And then there are moments when you can retreat to the bar and you can come in, have a drink, sit down. Everything else was pretty much walking and standing. But then you can kind of catch your breath in the bar, chat with someone else.

Felix Barrett:

Yeah. And that’s the one bit of theatrical vocabulary in terms of the formula. The interval bar that we’ve kept in because you do need that point just to be able to reacclimatize, but to get away from the atmosphere and just say, “Oh my gosh, what’s happening? I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t get it.” Or like, “Oh my gosh, if you see this, make sure you do that.” I think that’s quite an essential part of it.

Charlie Melcher:

How long are people generally in the show and how do you sort of wrap it up?

Felix Barrett:

So then it’s basically the maps. It’s about between two to three hours and with the sort of spirit of empowerment, if people want to leave before it’s absolutely fine. It’s like if you’re going through a museum. And I remember being a kid and wanting to go around the museums more quickly than my parents, so therefore the same with this. If you want to leave early, that’s totally fine. But for those who don’t and are lost in it, we wanted to find a satisfying way to wrap it up. So we now always make sure we have a finale that actually sort of hopefully quite imperceptibly paroles the audience together, gradually switches off the building, and pulls… So without them noticing, they come together as a collective body of audience in a sort of more conventional theatrical setup. And they all bear witness to the last scene, which sort of punctuates and rounds off the show.

Felix Barrett:

So it’s almost like audience flow design where they start off as individuals spat out on different floors and gradually over the three hours they come together. They all witness the same thing. So no matter what you’ve seen, you all get the same final sequence. They’re unified again, and they spill out into the bar, they can take the masks off, and then begins the best part of the night, which is them trying to piece together the stories through anecdotally with their rest of their loved ones.

Charlie Melcher:

And that is a huge part of it, right? Because now you are telling the story of your own experience. And in doing so, you’re making it real. You’re coming to understand it. You’re solidifying it in your memory, but then everyone’s trying to piece together pieces. And one of the things I thought was so brilliant is that you get this like, “Wait, you did what? I didn’t see that. I need to do that. I’m coming back. I want to do it again. I want to do it again.” Because I mean there’s not that many shows, honestly, where people are instantly feeling like they want to come back because there were key things they didn’t get to do. And you have that, right, repeat visitation that’s-

Felix Barrett:

It’s crazy. I think that was never an intentional part of it, but what’s happened… Particularly with maybe the one-on-ones. There are 16 locked doors. Can you find them all, let alone can you get into them all. But yeah, I think we try and make it as dense as possible. So actually if you do come back, there’s always something else to find. Nothing, no item of dressing… If there’s a mug on the table that you saw before, if you look underneath it, you’re going to find an inscription that actually pays off.

Charlie Melcher:

Do you find that people are sharing their stories socially? Is that a big piece of it as well? How do they share it other than with the people they went with?

Felix Barrett:

Well, that’s a really interesting point because, because the show’s been on such a long time now it’s really evolved. And actually we don’t allow cell phones into the show. So really it becomes… I mean, there’s a huge amount of fan art generated. And now here in London we’re putting up. But it’s interesting because if you look at a lot of modern day immersive work, so much of it is about particularly the immersive art explosion. Look, we’re bearing witness to it. It becomes about capturing yourself within the work and putting it into your channels. And we don’t do that. So if anything, I feel like we’re something of a relic of the past for stopping that now innate reaction to explorable artworks. And we’re asking ourselves if we were to do that, what new shows could we do where that’s just not an annoying gimmick or distracting for other audience? What’s the equivalent to the mask that enables a cell phone to exist inside a show?

Charlie Melcher:

So as a last question, Felix, first of all, thank you for taking us through that amazing journey of Sleep No More and your creative process with it. Where is Punchdrunk headed? What are you thinking about the evolution of your company and of the sort of space of immersive theater? I mean, you are one of these people, if there’s an original gangster, an OG for immersive theater, you’re kind of the man. Where do you see it heading, and for you specifically?

Felix Barrett:

Well, I think there’s a real need to evolve. And I think in the way that audiences are changing, we want to change too. Because if we’re asking our audience to take risks and find it dangerous inside a building, then we need to be able to take risks and find it dangerous ourselves making them. So we’re trying to break our own rule set again. And also another thing is the whole beginnings of this was wanting people to not know what’s behind the door. Now they do, so therefore we need to adapt. So we’re looking at how we can use technology. Where you’re looking at, yeah, as I was saying, about how you can use your cell phone, but not just to take bland pictures of yourself to post on Insta. And we’re also looking at how can you tell other stories? How can you tell other people’s stories rather than create alone. And we’re definitely doing our next three projects that are going back to proper collaborations, but I don’t think any of them will involve an audience in a mask. Which is really exciting.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I can’t wait to be taken down the rabbit hole with you anytime. I am just so excited for the things to come from Punchdrunk and so appreciative of your creative talents and can’t wait to be able to experience more of the memory-making, embodied, hair on the back of my neck rising in anticipation. Or just the feelings that I have when I’m inside one of your shows are very special and very unique and I am very thankful for them, so.

Felix Barrett:

Thank you so much. And thank you for inviting me on. It’s a pleasure to have been here. And can’t wait to host you in London and lift up the hood for you so you can look inside the machine.

Charlie Melcher:

My sincere thanks again to Felix Barrett for joining me on today’s podcast. To learn more about his work at Punchdrunk, please visit the links in the episode’s description. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation, and if you did, please consider subscribing to the FoST podcast and leaving us a nice review wherever you get your podcasts. You can also learn more about our other activities and become part of the FoST community by signing up for our free monthly newsletter at fost.org.

Charlie Melcher:

The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented production partner, Charts and Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of story telling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.