Punchdrunk - Burnt City

Sales for Wednesday and the rest of this week have not been pulled, so I hope this cancellation is tomorrow only, but it's difficult to understand what it could be that affects one night only. Maybe, a plumbing leak or something similar? If it were Covid, the whole week would have gone.

No shows on Mondays, so tomorrow would have been the first of the week.

Can you point me to where this is implied please?
I haven’t had a follow up email.
Just one to say cancelled and they’ll be in touch

Well this is turning into a complete nightmare to get replacement tickets and looking at the PD Facebook page I’m not alone.
No explanation and SEE tickets have given 24 hours to sort, no refunds and there seemingly no tickets of an equivalent value.
Very poor service and a bad impression before my first experience 😢

Wednesday night's show went ahead, to my relief. But what a nightmare trying to reach a venue 35 minutes by train from central London for the ridiculously early start time of 18:30 (if you want the full three loops). Weekday performances of this show are going to require an afternoon's holiday for many working people.

I must revise my earlier scathing views on Punchdrunk's front-of-house organisation: for this, they seem to have got their act together. At 18:20, there was a queue of just a dozen people, and my coat was checked and I was past the bar and into the show itself by 18:30. Coats are £1 to check; anything else is £5. I just pretended not to hear the people asking for phones. Provided your mobile is silenced and stays in your pocket, there isn't going to be a problem.

It's important to dress light, as it's quite warm inside. Definitely don't skimp on checking your outer garments.

Although I was in by 18:30, I missed the first ten minutes of the first of the three loops. What I think was the reset music seemed to happen about 23 minutes after the hour.

My partner saw what he thinks was the finale in Troy, and this ended at 21:20. He didn't attempt to then make his way to Mycenae as he assumed that was also complete, except it wasn't. I saw that, and it ended at 21:37. Whether he would have been allowed to make his way through to Mycenae at this point, I can't say.

After the show, coat retrieval was fast, and there were various polite and friendly security people in hi-viz outside who tried to direct us right, to avoid upsetting residents in the street ahead. Of course, Woolwich Arsenal station is straight ahead, and we needed that. We promised to be quiet, and there was no objection to us walking by the direct route, not that they can legally stop you going that way; it's a public street after all. (We didn't stop in the bar, as it seemed to be wines and spirits only, and there was no price list, and I couldn't be doing with trying to extract price info from the bar staff in the noisy room.)

So, what of The Burnt City itself?

Well, my predilection for knowing as little as possible about a film or theatre show before seeing it, backfired big time. I could not work out who the characters were, what they were doing, what the themes were, and what it all meant. My husband, who had gleaned info from fans on Facebook, got a lot more out of it. I didn't even work out that there were two cities, Troy and Mycenae. To me, it was just one big collection of rooms over two floors, each with an eclectic design that bore little relation to anything else.

It's not like I'm a Punchdrunk novice. I'm a veteran of Sleep No More (6 visits) and The Drowned Man (a dozen or so). So, I knew what to expect and how to proceed.

I think it's fair to say that The Drowned Man is the pinnacle of Punchdrunk's output -- by some margin -- and The Burnt City, in its current state, falls well short of that. Whereas the themes of the other shows instantly resonated, Burnt City just left me scratching my head. The co-creators seem to have run out of new artistic ideas; much of what I saw last night simply echoed ideas I'd seen in the other shows*. They even re-use a little of the music. I recognised one of the tracks from the beautiful score to the film Perfume upstairs in what I now know to be Mycenae, that also featured in The Drowned Man.



Luck was not on my side. I must have stumbled across the least interesting character in the whole she-bang, and tracked him for the whole of the first loop, despite his best effort to lose his followers by jumping off a first-floor balcony down to the level below. (This is a regular PD annoyance: characters who take routes that the public cannot, or disappear behind the scenes into locked rooms, so that you cannot complete their loops.) (Another problem is the need to wear contact lenses rather than glasses, which, despite what PD may say, don't really work with their masks, and contact lenses -- for me at least -- are not optimised for close-up vision.)

Some white masks were walking around in pairs holding hands. They don't seem to understand how it lessens the experience if you do not do it as an individual. Please can PD publish a rule to disallow hand-holding. Linked people are slow to move, get in the way and are a damned nuisance.

Surprisingly, both finales were greeted in complete silence: there was not even polite applause, and certainly not the whooping and hollering that the audience erupted into at the conclusion of The Drowned Man. I think my sense of being underwhelmed was widely shared.

Three stars, because I still found the overall experience fascinating, and I wasn't bored. I may venture back once the show is complete and once I have educated myself on what the story is.

I forgot to mention an issue with the policy of asking people to carry their mobile around in a sealed pouch. Judging by last night, some people forget to silence them first, and are then unable to do anything when they ring out loud during the show.

Obsessed with this thread. Even more convinced than ever that Punchdrunk is not for me. The mention of ‘white masks holding hands’ was the nail in the coffin for me 😹

Spoiler free thoughts after my second visit:

I guess this is still in previews, but unfortunately after my second go I had the same feeling of being underwhelmed as my first. This is the first time I've felt let down by a Punchdrunk show in the 5 productions I've seen (I was even enthralled in parts my Kabeiroi). So to try and be brief:

1) It was very much back to what they do best (so Sleep No More/Drowned Man Part III), which might be a relief to some after Kabeiroi, but to me felt very familiar and almost predictable. There was almost nothing I hadn't already seen before.

2) But unlike former shows the narrative seemed far more incoherent and vague. Once I knew the works SNM and TDM were based on I could more or less follow what was going on, or at the very least the general themes and overall arc. Even after a bunch of reading up before my second visit I still didn't have much of an idea as to what was going on or who was who. With a few exceptions, the characters aren't distinct enough and too many spend too long writing notes or playing with glasses or flowers and not really driving anything forward.

3) There are a few sets in Troy which conjure up the old Punchdrunk magic, but for a lot of it I was painfully aware I was in a warehouse in Woolwich. The set dressings aren't expansive or lush enough, the Mycenae battlefield is essentially a large carpeted warehouse space with curtains and a couple of steel structures. There is nothing as immersive or impressive as the forest, desert, ballroom, locker room etc. of TDM. It reminded me of some of the cheap post-Punchdrunk cash-ins I've been to over the years. Lacking in atmosphere and a true sense of place and time.

4) God, the audience. I guess from other threads here that standards have dropped generally, but I don't really go to big shows or musicals too often so I haven't really noticed until TBC. For one thing, I know they have a bottom line but the experience is not great when the same audience size of TDM is packed into half the space. Even SNM in NY felt less overcrowded. But soooooo many were clearly not into the spirit of the show at all, even with the "go it alone" spiel at the beginning. Maybe 40% were hand-holding, clinging together or in groups. You know, if people are too timid or unadventurous or insecure to spend a few hours alone then whatever. But when this translates to dawdling along blocking the way, talking loudly (a lot of this), or using the sets to take off masks and start making out or chat, then it's a problem. Black masks were oblivious and uninterested, which I haven't seen before at a Punchdrunk show - they're normally on the ball. At least phones weren't a problem, but I'm sure people will start to ignore the bag up your phone rule once word of the Insta-potential gets out.

So I've sold or given away my four remaining tickets in May and June. Going to try again later in the run when I hope they've tightened things up a bit and sorted out a few of these issues, because despite the rather rabid fanbase I doubt I'm the only one that's noticed. It was definitely interesting, it definitely had its moments, and clearly has a lot of potential. But it's not there for me yet.

And I know they won't do it, but it would be great if they sold some of the shows as single tickets only for people that want the proper experience, and then had multiple ticket sales for relaxed shows for the basics and tourists.

Not much of the budget seems to have been spent on costumes, which looked quite cheap. Footwear, in particular, often gave the impression of being "actor's own".

How do the time slots work?
If you go earlier can you wander round till it closes?
What times do regular PD recommend to get the full story arc?
Thanks

I loved The Drowned Man and have been so excited by this, but I'll be holding off based on all the reviews on here.