For those of you who don't already know the short, sinister stories of Edgar Allan Poe, ten of which are supposedly the basis for Punchdrunk's giant piece of drama at the Battersea Arts Centre, don't worry. The show bears about as much relationship to the 19th-century Gothic author as Siouxsie Sioux does to a bona fide Native American. Directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle with remarkable thoroughness and detail, this masque presumably aims to give the atmospheric notion of a Poe tale, rather than any explicit version of it. Essentially, the whole thing is a cross between a work of performance art and one of those "spooky" ghost walks that used to happen at school fetes, with the audience a proactive part of a wholly personal piece of theatre. It is a night stitched together by your curious discoveries.
On arrival, the audience is led in through a back entrance, where everyone is given an anonymous white mask that covers your entire face. A few minutes later, you are led through a series of red drapes illuminated by guttering candles. A forbidding man gives you a black velvet cloak, and you are off.
You are advised not to talk, or walk around in groups. To get the maximum experience from this "bespoke" theatrical experiment, one must do it alone. To this end, Punchdrunk has transformed the multifarious rooms and corridors of the rambling BAC into a chilling rendition of Victorian schlock horror. There are enough stuffed foxes to start a small, glass-eyed colony; tatty old carpets abound, bells toll the hour and creepy men dressed in frilly shirts and knickerbockers rush past, kissing your neck or hurling old hardback books at you (I experienced both) and shouting things like, "Let me die!" I ventured into one room, rather cosily heated by a real coal fire. The cosiness soon chilled, however, as I realised there was a silent man in a black mask standing right behind me. Another room was inhabited by a white-faced woman in a wing chair. In Mitford-style English, she read me a horror story about a woman with a missing memory, thanked me for my time and issued me out again. It was as if she had been waiting for me to come in, though I thought I had stumbled upon her by chance.
The Palais Royal, a cod music hall, is the one space where you can take off your mask, chat and just watch what's going on. When I arrived, one Roderick Usher (hero of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher") was being hypnotised on stage. I didn't stay there long. The idea is that you keep on walking, discovering room after dramatically designed room, each one a theatrical box of tricks filled with props such as groaning coffins and shrieking women. At one juncture I found myself swathed in a white gown, shoeless, blinded and led into an utterly dark chamber. Earphones were placed on my head, whereupon a tiny voice, possibly a child's, exhorted me to walk forward and "find" her. Groping in the dark, I suddenly grasped a human hand. I shouldn't tell you any more. Suffice to say that I managed to keep it together only by pretending that I was on a David Lynch film set. Not an experience for anyone given to panic attacks, or who is fearful of stuffed animals.
For its sheer dramatic control, The Masque of the Red Death is astonishing. At no point throughout the three hours and nowhere within the entire building did I spot the joins in the period cavorting. But such storytelling, paradoxically, becomes somewhat monotonous after a while. The creation of so relentless a spectacle, which - however fantastical - never manages to delve beneath the superficially startling, does start to become faintly ridiculous in its aims. If you attend, please pay scant attention to Punchdrunk's appeal to turn up in evening dress. I wore three-inch stiletto heels, only to spend the next three hours regretting it. There's a lot of walking around in the dark in this show.
For further info and booking details log on to: www.bac.org.uk
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Directed by Rupert Goold, he of the thrilling Macbeth. Ends 13 October.
Cabaret
Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1
From NS columnist to MC in this glorious paean to interwar Berlin – it’s none other than our very own Julian Clary.
The Pitmen Painters
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Lee Hall’s play about a group of miners who take up art.
