We sat down with Hector Harkness the co-director of Punchdrunk’s latest production, Viola’s Room. Harkness has over 20 years’ experience creating ground-breaking theatrical events.
Written by Booker Prize-shortlisted Daisy Johnson, Viola’s Room reimagines a classic gothic mystery for a new audience. It distils two decades of Punchdrunk’s immersive practice into an intimate sensory adventure that promises to infuse the dreams of anyone who dares to follow the light.
- Can you tell us where the inspiration for Viola’s Room came from?
The show’s based on a Victorian gothic horror called The Moonslave. It’s a brilliantly mysterious and enigmatic short story, and it was the inspiration for an intimate one-person show Punchdrunk created very early on in our existence. Now we’ve decided to revisit the story and reimagine it, working with the writer Daisy Johnson to turn it into a new kind of adventure.
- How will Viola’s Room be different from other recent Punchdrunk productions like The Burnt City or The Drowned Man?
It’s a very different kind of physical experience. Those previous Punchdrunk shows are partly about the thrill of exploring a space at will and piecing together your own adventure. In Viola’s Room you’ll flow through a story, beat by beat, riding the wave of it. We’re asking audiences to step into the dark and let us take their hands on a journey. What’s exciting for us is the opportunity to tell a tale from beginning to end, to distill what we love about sensory experiences into a compact design installation with a spine-tingling story at its core.
- Tell us a bit about your creative team and how this collaboration has been going so far?
We’ve assembled a really inspiring team of collaborators for this one, many of them new to Punchdrunk, and all of us creating something that’s pushing us in new directions. Our challenge is to make a show told through sound and light, so having Simon Wilkinson on board as lighting designer is really exciting for us, because of his experience in creating magic in miniature , as well as epic stage spectacle. Casey Jay Andrews is designing, bringing her previous history with Punchdrunk projects to create a richly detailed environment. And then Gareth Fry is our sound designer… as one of the leading sound artists in the world right now we’re thrilled to be crafting the audio world of this experience with him. It’s taking a lot of very close collaboration as we’re all making new discoveries at every turn. There’s also a big crew of makers, dressers, carpenters and technicians who are all working their socks off to make this intimate world a reality.
- What difference has it made to Punchdrunk having a permanent base?
It’s a real gamechanger for us to have a facility where we can keep experimenting and give proper resource to new ideas like Viola’s Room. It’s not easy for anyone creating artistic work at scale to find the places to do it in London, so we’re very lucky to have found these massive sheds in Woolwich that are a blank canvas for our ideas. Like most theatre companies we need to be in a space together, collaborating face to face, and it allows us to do that whether we’re trying a tiny moment or making an epic immersive world.
- Helena Bonham Carter will be the voice of the narrator. What was it like directing her when you recorded this?
I think when audiences come along to Viola’s Room they’ll instantly get why Helena was our dream casting for this show. She has the kind of voice that moves between soothing bedtime story and darkly secretive and mischievous. In the recording studio she threw herself into discovering the right tone, and like all our work on this project it was an experimental process which Helena jumped on board with. As is often the case when we make intimate work with text, we found that imaginative tasks (like whispering the text to a sleeping baby) meant we found a level of intimacy that’ll hopefully feel really visceral for our audience, like Helena’s right there with you in the dark!
- Viola’s Room is not a live performance – what would you describe it as?
I’m enjoy that currently it’s something unclassifiable! Perhaps if pushed I’d say it’s audio story come to life, it’s a sensory immersive adventure, and it’s an explorable art installation guided by light.
- Anything else you’d like to say to encourage people to come along?
Viola’s Room is for anyone who remembers the magical thrill of being read a bedtime story and slipping off into dreamland. We think it’s unlike anything you’ve seen before, so if you have an appetite for mind-bending new experiences, snap up a ticket!