Macbeth, Hammer horror and an abandoned school make a suitably haunted setting for Punchdrunk theatre company's latest production, which once again dissolves the boundaries between theatre and installation. Wearing white masks, the audience wanders through rooms and corridors at whim.
There is no 'performance'; instead rooms function as scenes in which the action has already taken place, or is about to. Some are deserted bedrooms with the remnants of burned love letters, others are laid out like burial chambers.
Yet another is a ghostly ballroom replete with a banquet and Christmas trees.
Elsewhere, a jazz singer is entertaining in a bar; men in dinner suits impassively carry coffins through corridors, while scattered objects and a creaky soundtrack further serve to mystify.
It's all well and good, and the simultaneous sense of an event and an unfinished story to be completed by the audience is impressively engineered. Beyond the occasional image, however, Macbeth is too feebly incorporated to create any sense of a relationship between play and audience. What is intended as an interactive experience instead feels oddly passive, since the level on which one is able to engage is consistently elusive. Punchdrunk have created an intriguing dramatic atmosphere of unease. It would be nice to have something more solid to hang it on.
- Sleep No More runs until Dec 20, The Beaufoy Building, Black Prince Road SE11, continuous performance Mon to Sat from 7pm, last admission 9pm, £12, £10 concs, £8 under-18s. Tel: 020 8658 8341. Tube: Kennington/Vauxhall
