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.'
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