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.”
I like a fever dream myself, which helps to explain why, a couple of weeks ago, I found myself in stocking feet, crawling on the floor of the Shed. “Viola’s Room” was being installed in the downstairs gallery space, and I took a tour with Hector Harkness, the co-director, and Casey Jay Andrews, the designer.
We began in the bedroom of a teenage girl, circa the mid-1990s. There was a Tori Amos poster on the wall, a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” still and Pre-Raphaelite prints. On the floor were multiple mattresses and pillows.
“You’re here for your sleepover,” Andrews said. Funny that the company known for “Sleep No More” was now encouraging me to nap.
“Viola’s Room” is based on “The Moon Slave,” a brief and spectral 1901 story by the English horror writer Barry Pain. The tale, now adapted for Punchdrunk by the English author Daisy Johnson, is set in a fable-like world of palaces and gardens. The suburban design seems to contradict this, but the bedroom soon opens onto other rooms, some realistic, some dripping in symbolism and metaphors. Paths loop and crisscross. Objects glimpsed in miniature recur at full size. The same space seemingly reappears, changed. Though the Pain story offers narrative scaffolding, the governing logic is dream logic.
“What we try to do is take you on this barefoot journey from reality into some other place that feels like it’s beyond the veil,” Harkness said. (Barrett had a different term for this place: “a living, breathing wonderland.”)
In most Punchdrunk shows, masked audiences roam at will, often chasing after actors. Here the path was exact and prescribed. Each participant is issued a pair of headphones, loaded with the Pain-Johnson short story, read by Helena Bonham Carter, that most crepuscular of actresses. “If you’ve got this incredible gothic mystery, dripping in atmosphere and sparkling with a frosty sheen, who do you want to whisper in your ear?” Barrett said.
No other actors are heard or seen. Bonham Carter’s voice and the precise deployment of some 1,565 individual light fixtures lead the audience members on. The piece, which lasts about an hour, is designed to be experienced solo or in groups of up to six. Barrett relished the control this form provided, the chance to embrace narrative. “I got to the point where I was really wanting to have clarity for audience, something to crescendo,” he said.
Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director, saw the renewed “Viola’s Room” in London, where it debuted in 2024. He had worked with Barrett before, including on “It Felt Like a Kiss,” a 2009 piece that Punchdrunk created for the Manchester International Festival. A haunted house and a lesson in American history, it also led audiences down a predetermined path. (That path ended in a man holding a chain saw. I wish I were exaggerating when I say that I hardly slept for a week after seeing it.)
Poots loved “Viola’s Room,” particularly its departure from the mask shows. “It’s as enveloping and as interactive as ‘Sleep No More,’” Poots said. “But it’s in a totally different language. Few people create one revolution, but I thought, ‘Oh, they’ve done it again.’”
The show needed little adjustment for its New York transfer. The London run had already taught Punchdrunk how to care for the audience, particularly audience members used to the go-almost-anywhere, try-almost-anything aesthetic of some of its other shows. Most aspects are unchanged: the three miles of muslin, the hundreds of ballet shoes, the rooms infused with bespoke scents. One of them is called “Burnt Witch.” (Though the show is extremely tech heavy, involving more than 2,000 light cues, that tech is invisible.) But the layout has been gently altered and some of the design deepened.
“The British audience is more reserved, the New York audience is more hungry and a bit more tactile,” Barrett said. “So it’s about leaning into the inflections, sharpening some of the edges, making sure that if you do go deeper there’s more detail to find, because actually a New York audience will go deeper quickly and it’s so important that no detail is superfluous.”
When it works (and I can acknowledge that even in its nascent form, it worked on me) the effect is transporting, with a feeling of having wandered from innocence to experience and back again, somewhere between sleep and waking. Wonderland. Beyond the veil.
Barrett hadn’t known if he would make his way back here again. Returning to the show in midlife, as the company is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary, feels like a privilege. “And it’s really thrilling to complete something and go, ‘Yes, that’s how it always should have been,’” Barrett said. In the next few years he is hoping to revisit other early experiments, to move forward by looking back.
In the meantime, “Viola’s Room,” scheduled to run through Oct. 19, invites you to close your eyes. And open them. And dream.
“The greatest rewards,” Harkness said, “are if you can step through the darkness.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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