Three years after Punchdrunk closed the doors of its vast Woolwich production, audiences are being invited back into its labyrinth for the world premiere of Persephone, a new film following The Burnt City through the eyes of one of its most mysterious characters.
For three years, the gates of Troy have remained closed. This September, Punchdrunk will open them once again.
The pioneering immersive theatre company is returning to the world of The Burnt City for one weekend only, transforming its Woolwich home into a cinema for the first public screenings of Persephone. Rather than merely showing the film at a conventional venue, Punchdrunk is bringing audiences back to the physical environment in which the original production was created and performed.
Directed by Derrick Belcham and Punchdrunk founder Felix Barrett, Persephone captures The Burnt City as it existed on stage while rearranging its sprawling narrative around a single journey. Lily Jo Ockwell reprises the title role, with Sam Booth appearing as Hades.
Moving between Troy and Mycenae, Persephone witnesses the encounters, rituals and tragedies unfolding across the two cities. Each scene reveals another thread within the production’s larger mythology, gradually binding its fragmented stories together through themes of memory, longing and fate.
It is a particularly fitting perspective from which to revisit The Burnt City. Unlike the production’s masked audience members, who were free to choose whom to follow and where to wander, Persephone crossed between its different worlds. Her journey provides a line through a work deliberately designed to resist any single, definitive viewing.
Inspired by Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and Euripides’s Hecuba, The Burnt City transported the fall of Troy into a dystopian landscape of warehouses, neon-lit streets, shrines, bedrooms and subterranean bars. Audiences explored the production independently, following performers through its immense environment and assembling their own versions of the story from the scenes they happened to encounter.
No two visits could reveal everything. A character glimpsed briefly by one audience member might become the centre of another’s evening; a major confrontation could unfold behind a door that others never opened. The production’s meaning emerged as much from what remained unseen as from what was discovered.
A film inevitably changes that relationship. The wandering spectator is replaced by the camera, and the simultaneous possibilities of the live production become a composed sequence of images. Yet Persephone also offers something that the original format could not: an opportunity to follow one continuous path through the labyrinth and see events that might previously have remained concealed.
It is therefore neither a straightforward archival recording nor an attempt to reproduce the freedom of the live experience. Instead, it promises a new route through the material, allowing the world of The Burnt City to be reconsidered through a character who stood both within and beyond its central conflicts.
The screening also raises a compelling question about the afterlife of immersive theatre. Punchdrunk’s productions are defined by their physical scale and ephemerality. Buildings are transformed, fictional cities appear and, once a production ends, those worlds become accessible only through objects, photographs and the memories of those who passed through them.
By returning the film to Woolwich, Punchdrunk is allowing the recorded and remembered versions of The Burnt City to meet. Audiences will not be released into the labyrinth as they once were, but they will once again cross its threshold and occupy the place where the production lived.
The film will receive its world premiere on Friday 25 September at 7pm, with a red-carpet arrival, complimentary welcome drink and an exclusive post-screening conversation with members of The Burnt City creative team.
Further screenings will take place on Saturday 26 September at 2.30pm and 7.30pm, followed by a final screening on Sunday 27 September at 7.30pm.
VIP tickets include early entry to the Prop Store, access to a private lounge, two signature cocktails or non-alcoholic alternatives, priority seating, a The Burnt City gift bag and priority booking for Punchdrunk’s next London production.
For those who once wandered its streets, Persephone offers a chance to see the city differently. For those who never entered, it may be the closest opportunity yet to pass through the gates of Troy.
Punchdrunk presents Persephone
The Carriageworks, 5 Carriage Street, Royal Arsenal, London SE18 6DJ
World premiere: Friday 25 September 2026 at 7pm
VIP £90 | Standard £75 | Concession £50
Further screenings: Saturday 26 September at 2.30pm and 7.30pm; Sunday 27 September at 7.30pm
VIP £60 | Standard £45 | Concession £35
Running time: 120 minutes, including a 20-minute interval.
Tickets are available through Punchdrunk.