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Tthe fascinating adventure begins with a dream. We are invited to lie down as the lights fade and the story begins, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. Her voice pours into our ears through binaural headphones, sometimes velvety and catchy, other times a grating whisper.
It tells an intricate story written by a Booker-nominated writer Daisy Johnson and featuring the parallel lives of a modern-day teenager alongside a princess. A reimagining of Barry Payne’s 1901 short story The Moon-Slave steeped in Victorian Gothic, featuring Dionysian femininity, but also a prince, disappearance and a journey steeped in the night.
The concept has a work in progress: the company’s first show in 2000 was an interpretation of Payne’s story seen by only four people due to cost constraints. Two decades later, the story is squeezed into a winding series of unlit corridors through which we travel with headphones and where the everyday intersects with the otherworldly, from the teenager’s sparkly bedroom decorated with posters, to the gothic interior of the castle and the glittering forests. Johnson’s parallel worlds contain shades of Narnia – we wander through children’s dens and wardrobes to discover fantastical realms nestled in the everyday.
Conceived by Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett, who co-directs with Hector Harkness, it’s a darkly enticing production that plays with well-worn tropes but spins them in an unfamiliar way. “Surely it’s all a dream?” says the narrator as the tale takes strange turns and feels like a beautiful, enveloping one that delicately hovers between bedtime story, fairy tale, child’s play and nightmare.
Where The burnt city, the company’s inaugural show at their sprawling new home in south-east London, left you stranded in its depths, its polar opposite. It is closely lined with history with only one path: to the lights that wink a path ahead.
And where that production was monumental, this one is boutique, intimate, enveloping us in its folds. Groups of up to six venture into the space under the guidance of silence, but the sense of togetherness grows. We walk in without shoes and the textures change underfoot, from a soft, squishy game-style floor to the sand-covered floors of Pain’s story, and then a soft grit that leaves you feeling vulnerable as if we’ve strayed off the path to the lost, fern – understory forests.
The impenetrable darkness sometimes keeps us safe, but also lurks around us as if alive (lighting design by Simon Wilkinson). But then we turn a corner and the light casts an exciting vision: a tree glowing like a Yayoi Kusama installation; a hastily left banquet, magnificently exquisite in its wealth. There is dazzling miniaturization with tiny castles whose lanterns twinkle alongside large cut-out silhouettes that have the effect of a life-size zoetrope.
The story doesn’t follow rational logic, but instead becomes a strange kind of liminal chatter associated with an unnameable fear, and you feel it as you travel through increasingly dark, narrow spaces. Central to building the sensory world is Gareth Frye’s sound design. The playlist – Massive Attack, Smashing Pumpkins, Tori Amos – evokes a 1990s mood and teenage world, before returning to the fairy tale with Bach’s Matthew Passion.
There’s exquisite detail in the rooms we wander through, co-designed by Barrett and Casey J. Andrews, particularly in the scattered detritus of teenage life, but with a surreal edge, such as reams of redacted paper and upturned furniture, which lends a sense of more a dark universe entering the ordinary.
Only an hour long, it instills so many puzzling wonders that you want to go right back to find other undisturbed paths in Viola’s quest.
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