Culture | Theatre Would you go to SE18 to have Helena Bonham Carter whisper a gothic bedtime yarn in your ear? That’s effectively the offer of Punchdrunk ’s underwhelming new show, in which the actress’s recorded voice, playing over headphones, guides small groups of barefoot punters through a series of scenarios from the story of a doomed princess. There are exquisite miniature models, 2-D silhouette cutouts, lifesized stage-sets both folkloric and modern, all unpeopled. You and your fellow travellers are led to them through a labyrinth of corridors and antechambers, created in the immersive-theatre pioneers’ vast HQ in the former Woolwich Arsenal buildings.
The path in front of you gently illuminates as the way behind dims. Bonham Carter’s honeyed voice murmuringly tells you how orphaned Viola is compelled to dance to the point of exhaustion, beside a hawthorn tree in a maze, in the nights before her marriage to Prince Hugo. The themes are transgression and possession at the point of sexual maturity, the language florid.
The moon is “an orb rising, grotesquely pregnant”, for instance. I suspect there’s also a joke in the title’s initials, VR – Punchdrunk suggesting that their form of virtual reality is an experiential alternative to the online kind. Conceived, directed and designed by company founder Felix Barrett, the 50-minute journey features moments of complete darkness, a crawl through a confined space, and a tight squeeze through a narrowing, padde.