Latest news with #FelixBarrett
Vogue
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Vogue
I Survived ‘Viola's Room,' a Spooky New Immersive Show Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter
The real world is plenty scary right now. Forget turning on some gruesome horror movie: reading the daily headlines is enough to make just about anyone scream. All the same, I couldn't resist doubling down on the fear factor and checking out an eerie, immersive new art experience that opened in New York City this week. On through October at The Shed, the show, titled Viola's Room, is directed by Felix Barrett and produced by Punchdrunk, the award-winning theater company behind Sleep No More. An interactive, hour-long journey, it has guests weave barefoot through a labyrinth of darkened rooms and halls (by designer Casey Jay Andrews), while a delightfully spooky Helena Bonham Carter narrates a fable, based on the 1901 story The Moon Slave by Barry Pain, through provided headphones. Even with no live actors or jump scares, it makes for an intensely effective—even somewhat poetic—haunted-house experience. Guests walk through Viola's Room. Photo: Marc J. Franklin When I arrived for my prescribed time slot, I was surprised to find that there was only one other brave soul in my group. (Viola's Room is designed to be experienced by no more than six people at a time.) Our instructions were simple enough: do not lose sight of each other, and follow the flickering lights from space to space. (I was more than happy to let my partner lead the way.) In the first space—a teenage girl's bedroom, its walls adorned with Tori Amos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer posters—Carter instructs us to lie down as she begins to tell the gothic tale of a princess who disappears from her castle, abandons her prince, and mysteriously journeys into the night. In time, the room around us was plunged into darkness, the only light coming from inside a blanketed fort in the corner. When, skeptically, we crawled into that fort, we immediately entered into a brand-new space: a maze of hallways lined with ghostly, draped white sheets. As Carter's narration goes on, she describes the princess's descent into an enchanted and ominous forest—just as we, too, were taken through ever more otherworldly settings. Walking barefoot, we traversed terrains that felt alternately grassy, sandy, and like concrete, our surroundings ranging from a forest landscape to a high-ceilinged chapel featuring stained-glass windows suffused with a foggy light. Another room with a giant dinner table had balloons lining the ceiling, though in the darkness their strings felt more like vines, or even spiderwebs.
New York Times
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter
Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: 'Viola's Room.' Didn't see 'Viola's Room'? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of 'Viola's Room,' then called 'The Moon Slave,' at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators. 'It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,' Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has. A reconceived 'Viola's Room' began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas ('Sleep No More,' which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater. 'It's all about trying to do things that our audiences aren't expecting,' Barrett said. 'Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.' Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
