T he immersive adventure begins with a sleep. 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 playful, other times a scratching whisper.
She tells a tangled tale, written by Booker-nominated novelist Daisy Johnson and featuring the parallel lives of a modern-day teenager alongside a princess. A re-imagining of Barry Pain’s 1901 short story The Moon-Slave, it is steeped in Victorian gothic, featuring Dionysian femininity, but also a prince, a disappearance and a grief-soaked journey into the night. There is unfinished business to the concept: the company’s first show in 2000 was an interpretation of Pain’s story, only seen by four people due to cost constraints.
Two decades on, the story is squeezed into a winding series of unlit corridors through which we travel wearing our headsets, and in which the everyday intersects with the otherworldly, from the teenager’s sparkly, poster-clad bedroom to a castle’s gothic interior and glittering forests. Johnson’s parallel worlds hold shades of Narnia – we wander through children’s dens and wardrobes to find fantasy realms nestling within the quotidian. Conceived by Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett who co-directs with Hector Harkness, it is a darkly alluring production which plays with well-worn tropes but spins them in unfamiliar ways.
“It’s all a dream, surely?” says the narrator as .