Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns choreography by Ms. As an advertising slogan for a tabloid newspaper used to say, enquiring minds want to know.īy Emursive directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle design by Mr. (It’s a thank-you note from the socially correct Lady Macbeth.) That doesn’t mean that you won’t follow their leads once they’ve moved on. It can make you feel kind of shabby, watching other audience members rifling through a suitcase that Lady Macduff has left on a bed or reading a letter on the desk in Duncan’s sitting room.
And it seems to me that sense of guilty enjoyment, translated into theatrical terms, is a large part of what Punchdrunk is trying to elicit here. Danvers, an allusion to the Hitchcock film “Rebecca,” was in an earlier and slightly less spectacular incarnation of “Sleep No More,” which I saw last year in Brookline, Mass.) That director was the ultimate master of making us feel complicit in film’s invasion of private lives and ugly deaths. References to Hitchcock - the McKittrick is a nod to “Vertigo” - abound. The mood-matching sound design includes period pop recordings (“Goodnight Children, Everywhere,” “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square”), techno music (but only for the witches) and swoony, suspenseful Bernard Herrmann scores for Hitchcock movies. The knockout set pieces (and the detail in every room is remarkable) include a painterly banquet scene and an unnerving black mass sequence led by three ambisexual witches. Doyle, these activities are executed with tense balletic virtuosity by neurotic, anguished and gymnastic creatures, who climb the walls (I mean literally) in moments of high stress. (The Macbeth mansion has many bathtubs.) Choreographed by Ms. These jaded figures can be found in bedrooms, bathrooms, ballrooms, hospital rooms and nurseries getting dressed and undressed, doing the foxtrot, making every kind of love, killing one another and washing off blood. (Because the roles are mostly double-cast, I am not mentioning individual performers, but they are all lissome enough to make the audience look slow and dumpy.) Dressed in drop-dead, Deco-era evening clothes, scanty lingerie or nothing at all, these characters include the Macbeths (of course), Macduff and his wife (who is conspicuously pregnant), Duncan (the king) and various witches and hotel employees. The idea is once you’re let loose on one of the floors of the hotel, you pick out a single character and pursue him or her (though you can switch any time you want), as the performer runs, dances and vaults all over the place. The creative team here has taken on the duties of messing with your head, which they do just as thoroughly as any artificial stimulant. But they should know that sentimentally partaking of any mood-altering substances is inadvisable.Īn unimpaired sense of balance and depth perception is crucial to attending “Sleep No More,” which leads its audience on a merry, macabre chase up and down stairs, and through minimally illuminated, furniture-cluttered rooms and corridors.
New Yorkers with fond memories of nights out in the era of theme-park clubs like Area and MK have the chance to relive their salad days with this production (if they can score tickets). Punchdrunk, a British site-specific theater company, has taken over three abandoned warehouses on West 27th Street to enact the sorry sights of the murderous Macbeths’ career in a movable orgy titled “Sleep No More.” And the resulting adventure in décor - a 1930s pleasure palace called the McKittrick - suggests what might have happened had Stanley Kubrick (of “Eyes Wide Shut” and “The Shining”) been asked to design the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, with that little old box maker Joseph Cornell as a consultant.
Don’t be surprised if it shows up soon on the cover of Architectural Digest, bloodstains and all. The Thane of Cawdor and his wife have moved into a deserted hotel in the hinterlands of the West 20s, and my dear, what they’ve done with the place. Those pushy Macbeths may be backstabbing social climbers, but you must admit that their new digs are to die for.
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