Review: Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City. A raw, wild triumph over the intellect
For Leonie Marzecki, a brilliant producer, director, philhellene and a member of the excellent Design team for this production; my cousin
“Just hold it there,” the usher says.
The curtains are drawn in front of me and another lone attendee, just in time to catch a glimpse of the familiar plague-doctor-esque masks being donned by those who made the first cut; they peer fleetingly, hauntingly out at me, as if through time from nine years ago when I scraped into the closing weekend of The (near-legendary) Drowned Man. I haven’t attended a Punchdrunk production since, but you don’t forget these masks.
While we wait, I turn to the audience member next to me. “Have you been before?”
“Oh yes,” she says, “This is my fifth time.”
I’m impressed, but it’s not unusual. The usher tells us there is a 100 Club. The lady says that of her attendances, the best were when she was alone — once she’d brought a friend and spent too much time worrying what they thought of it all; of another, she was trying to be too strategic, to catch as much of the story as possible — “in my head” she puts it, in the modern parlance. The usher agrees: “Get out of your head, and into your stomach.” (He isn’t a native English speaker, so I suppose he means what we’d call ‘gut’.)
I had been thinking The Iliad a more auspicious storyline for a Punchdrunk production, given I’ve had a smattering of it almost as long as I can remember; surely this would be an asset in tracking the notoriously sprawling, multifaceted, multi-synchronous story arcs? Nope, this conversation has reminded me: get out of your head. This stuff is no good in there.
Actually — it occurs — it’s the ideal medium for a different reason. We all learn The Iliad in dribs and drabs, with varying chronology. Like many of my generation, my introduction was Marcia Williams’ beautiful comic strip version, which barrels through insistently from the birth of Achilles to the wooden horse, followed by the fun and games of The Odyssey. Only later in the foothills of adolescence did I realise that Book 1 of Homer’s original in fact begins in media res, with Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon over his taking of…ARGH!
“Shut up, brain or I’ll stab you with a Q-tip!” to quote another Homer.
We are greeted by a museum curator, who after gesturing towards a glass-cased pottery fragment, advises us to “leave your loved ones…for now”. A door opens to his right: “That one’s yours”, he commands a small cluster, who obediently plough through into the unknown.
One audience member stands apart from the rest of us. Impossible to say for sure as we are all now masked — anonymised in ghostly, trademark Punchdrunk style — but I fancy it’s the diehard I spoke to minutes before, embarking confidently on her fifth viewing.
“You!” the curator says to her “Stay here.” The rest of us are sent on our way; as I leave, I hear him begin to intimately address the bold loner, “You will find this place to be a labyrinth…”
I leave them to it, following the crowd, but as I glance back through another open door we pass, I see her making her way up a flight of stairs. That’s what ‘out of your head’ looks like; it takes practice.
As we walk we see another artefact — a full Grecian vase this time — depicting Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia, and then another: Agamemnon’s murder by his vengeful wife, Clytemnestra.
“How,” I wonder “am I going to get out of my head, if half of it is dressed up like a museum exhibition? I could get this at the Brit — — ah!”
The next glass case stands waiting — but smashed. In place of the apparently stolen treasure is a lock of hair, and what is unmistakeably a prayer card; unlike, however, any prayer card I have ever seen before.
The prayer is to Apollo, the Greek god of healing, music, poetry and, in some tellings, the Sun. As a Christian, its words are striking — almost menacing — in their earnestness; as one who misspent some teenage months as a ‘Wiccan’, the prayer’s ending words ‘Blessed Be!’ are familiarly mischievous.
The effect on the audience is to quite literally smash through the protective glassware of our 21st century lenses; we are no longer safe, secular, deracinated. Impetuous deities stalk our cosmos, and some of our fellow mortals will breach any earthly boundary to please and appease them. An ambient voiceover warns learnedly of the same “…some of these gods may demand a blood sacrifice.”
As a device to shake us up, it is incredibly impactful. But old habits die hard, and I can’t help thinking back to Johnathan Bi’s wonderful conversational lecture series on Rene Girard’s mimetic theory, which centres on the scapegoat mechanism — the cathartic sacrifice necessary to all societies in order to preserve or restore a fragile harmony — and grateful that we live in an essentially Christian order, in which the founding sacrifice was God’s — not to gods — thus liberating us from the relentless cycles of vio… GARRGH!!
We finally spy the sensational narrative choreography for which Punchdrunk is renowned, which I will not be able to assess without making it sound like a shitty drama school movement piece so I will leave to the experts. A young woman hooded in a red coat is lured atop an enormous anti-tank barricade, then from behind accosted by a bearded man in military attire. At some point, her coat is removed revealing a white dress and veil — ah, this must be a newly-wed Helen, wooed by Paris; any minute now he will — oh no, wait he’s… raising a fist that can’t be right. He’s…pummelling her; definitely not.
It is of course the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father; the marital-type attire suggesting instead her virginity — and the red perhaps her sexual maturity, or simply a foreboding of the violence that befalls her.
This is about as successful as my intellect gets in mapping the evening onto my prior knowledge of the story. Partly it is down to said knowledge being patchy in places; partly down to the structure being deliberately elliptic — there is little dialogue, no programme and the sketched-effect portraits of the cast members back on the reception wall little use once in the thick of the production.
I spend a good half hour mesmerised by an amorous god and goddess cavorting amidst the cadaver of a sacrificed beast — the blood apparently aphrodisiac in his effects; only later seeing the female kill Agamemnon in a shower do I realise it is Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. (This is after a separate encounter with Aegisthus in a bedroom wearing a freaky skin-mask who I’d been convinced was the enigmatic Hermes.)
After accepting my head isn’t in command of this any more than The Drowned Man — which I contentedly pottered round for three hours with nary a clue what was happening — I finally relax. I’ve spent so long in one area that I see a resurrected, red-clad Iphigenia about to ascend the anti-tank obstacle again and realise the story is being played out for the second time at least, and move on.
I join a gaggle of plague doctors making their way through the door warning us we are leaving Mycenaean territory for the warzone of Troy. Amidst the brilliant, byzantine network of fully immersive sets we expect from Punchdrunk, I find myself at last surrendering to the spirit of these productions. I enjoy watching a chase-duel between two characters I have no hope of naming, through a shop window, and turning a few plague doctor masks as I emerge through the shop door after the encounter is over; a broken Priam — only identifiable by the stylised ‘P’ on his plush study folder — is unseated by dissolute, rockstar Paris who later engages in a playful tussle with a plague doctor over two whiskeys; Angelo Badalementi’s The Pink Room returns from The Drowned Man (and Twin Peaks) to accompany someone I am um… pretty sure is Helen dancing drunkenly with Cassandra. I am even unsure as to the gender of some of the performers, which again I can only assume is partly intentional.
The most affecting scene is the confrontation between the Greeks fronted by Agamemnon and the Trojan women led by Hecuba. As the city doors open to the swaggering conquerors, it is as if — again — pagan morality has marched unwelcomed into our consciousness. I am taken back to the epic podcast series Literature & History in which Doug Metzger points out that the unprecedented complexity of The Iliad’s characters is matched by the grey moral landscape of the plot:
“There is no right or wrong side to Homer. Both Greece and Troy have heroes and scoundrels…Agamemnon, as unpleasant a character as he is, is also an unwavering leader. Even Paris, who has the gifts of love and not war, makes full use of the virtues that he does possess.”
Again to Girard; Johnathan Bi:
“We still tend to predominantly think of one person as good or evil…Christianity I think will engage in a fundamental revaluation of values; it will turn the polarity from one being contrasted in judging people on ‘powerless’ to ‘powerful’ and will turn it into ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and so it is this polarity as the dominant view with which we judge moral characters.” (Lecture IV: The Scapegoat MechanismA Revaluation of Values 46mins, 32secs)
I’m ready to ‘fess up that as a preteen half-Greek Londoner ransacking the mythic corpus for identity, I cared nothing for the morality of the Trojan War — only vaguely insisting that ‘we’ were right because Paris ‘stole’ Helen, but anyway the most important thing is that ‘we’ were clever and beat those Trojans, who I anachronistically identified with modern-day Turks.
But as a 33-year-old, gazing at the half-naked Polyxena strung upside-down and whirled around in a cross between a war crime and a trapeze act, there is no room to exclude the bitter humanity of the conquered. It is a hypnotically moving spectacle; I find myself unfolding my arms and clasping my hands in front of my groin, as if at a funeral. Even walking away after she is lowered and attended by Cassandra feels disrespectful.
This is what makes the Punchdrunk treatment so apt for The Iliad. Its economy of language in favour of the embodied does after all succeed in breaking us out of our heads, and experience what James Delingpole called “Western civilisation in its rawest, wildest, most untutored state”. The immersive intimacy ignites our sympathies for all manner of characters as they ebb and flow along the powerful-to-powerless polarity. Even the loop in which Punchdrunk characters are doomed to repeat their story arcs across the evening suits the tragic cyclicality in which the ancients understood the universe. This also seems to inform the disturbing finale, in which the dead characters form a circular danse macabre; living again “in freedom, in the garden of the Lord” they ain’t.
And yet I am still left with questions. Why are the damned led by a still vivacious Clytemnestra? Hasn’t she been murdered by Orestes and Electra yet? Well then what is she doing in the realm of the dead if she’s still alive? Isn’t this Hades’ job? Or was I then not entirely wrong to imbue her with divine characteristics after all? Are they trying to say that… —
DAARRRRRGH!!!!
I may need a few more visits.
