![]() ![]() The production received a Thea Award for Outstanding Achievement in Connected Immersion Theatre in November 2017. Sleep No More received the prestigious Best Breakthrough Act at Shanghai’s Annual TV & Culture Awards on 13 June 2017. This production sees new surprises hidden across 5 stories of this newly built building in the Jing’An District.įollowing productions in London, Boston and New York, Shanghai's Sleep No More runs alongside the continued run of The McKittrick Hotel in New York (please see here for further information on the New York show). Taking Punchdrunk’s work to Asia for the very first time, Punchdrunk International and SMG Live have co-produced a re-imagined version of the original production, now set in Shanghai in the 1930s. Audiences move freely through the epic story, creating their own journeys through a film noir world. Sleep No More tells Shakespeare’s classic tragedy Macbeth through a darkly cinematic lens, offering an audience experience unlike anything else. The doors to the McKinnon Hotel - home of Sleep No More in Shanghai - are now open. See it.THE MCKINNON HOTEL, 1013 WEST BEIJING ROAD, SHANGHAIĬo-Produced by Punchdrunk International and SMG Live Sleep No More could have succeeded with half the thought, energy, and intelligence expended here. How do they keep things from going off the rails? How do they keep from bumping into spirits and breaking the props, the mirrors, the ankles? They do, somehow, and the evident hazard only heightens the drama. It’s hard to sell a fight scene to the camera, still harder to sell it in the round here, they sell Banquo’s murder in a bar room as a knockdown, drag-out choreographed brawl with the audience wandering all over the place and a floor coated with sawdust. Many scenes are danced, the dancing is both excellent and difficult and, I would think, dangerous - perching on incarnadine bathtubs, armoires, shelves, and a billiard table - and of course there are spirits wandering everywhere. (Am I supposed to tell you about what happened in that closed room? Is it a mystery? A secret? ) Macbeth is also about rules: how do you know what to do? Here, you don’t. Here, too, I sense lots of thought, and layers of meaning at which I can hardly guess. They place incredible demands on showmanship. The sets are elaborate, intricate, and worth study as installation art. And, as in all Mysteries, much depends on what you yourself bring into the room. We accept that the performance will be different every night every reading of a hypertext, or experience of hyperdrama, will vary. It has always been the nature of theater. DeWinter’s scene? Of those, how many are in the bar when the band strikes up Paper Moon ? How many get the Woyzeck allusion the next day, or ever? This is the nature of the medium. The experience works here, but it is going to be different for everyone. Hypertext skeptics often wring their hands about what people don’t see, about the work spent by the author on a path not taken. But the American Repertory site has five publicity stills, and I saw none of those moments. After the show - the story repeats so you can see more - I thought I’d managed to witness most of the major scenes and to see most of the settings. In the bar after the performance, the third song just happens to pick up the story about the dead girl and the moon of rotten wood, a story Mrs. There’s a lot going on in Sleep No More, but of course a lot of Macbeth is about the intersection of the world we know and the spirit world. Nor is this, I think, a throwaway, a casual interpolation. And there’s no distance at all the acting and the sets have to work from the back of the room and they have to work if you're standing right there, reading the slip of paper someone left on the dresser, feeling the actress stroke the back of our neck. The rules are unclear, we’ve just started. It’s not improv: the story, it turns out, is scene 21 of Woyzeck. This was extraordinary theater, an unforgettable penetration of the fourth wall. She leans very close, her hand brushing the back of my neck.Īnd then, very slowly, she removes my mask. Leaning close, she begins to tell me a whispered story about a dead girl who finds the moon made of rotten wood. The spirits file out the door.Īs I am leaving, Mrs. DeWinter (Poornima Kirby), trying to comfort an agitated, alarmed Banquo (Jeffery Lyon) in a 1920’s dressing room cluttered with torn almanac pages and bric-a-brac. ![]() Some of the characters sometimes see ghosts.Īt one point, a bunch of us spirits were watching a strange, agitated woman, The Second Mrs. You wear a white mask, a spirit who can witness but cannot intervene. The audience is free to wander everywhere. It is performed in a disused public school. The play refracts Macbeth through Hitchock’s Rebecca. Photo by Stephen Dobbie and Lindsay Nolin. Tori Sparks in Sleep No More, a Punchdrunk and A.R.T. ![]()
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