Locked Door Puzzle

The Masque of the Red Death is a theatrical production running in London at the moment by promenade theatre pioneers Punchdrunk. What makes this production relevant to this blog is that promenade theatre is an interactive experience where you are allowed to wander about freely essentially creating your own experience within the stories being told.

Writing this piece is probably going to be a bit trickier than normal. This isn’t because of the different medium but because I’ve been playing video games since I was a child and can look at them with a reasonable detachment. However I found my visit The Masque of the Red Death an absolutely incredible experience and am now finding it difficult to talk about it without collapsing into a drooling mess of a fanboy. That’s not to say everyone would love it quite as much as I did, for me it just hit all the right buttons. There’s no point me trying to convince you to go see it yourself anyway as it’s sold out now until the end of the run, so you’ve missed out, truly.

The Beating of His Hideous Heart!

The Masque of the Red Death was originally a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. His stories were typically dark and morbid often revolving around vengeance, murder, and obsession and Punchdrunk’s production is actually based on a fusion of nine of his tales and also incorporates The Black Cat, William Wilson, The Fall of the House of Usher, Berenice, Ligeia, The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, The Tell Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado along with some original material in the same style. The various tales are told at different times in different places throughout the building, many running in parallel. The whole thing is looped to run twice per night to give you a chance to see other parts of the performance you missed first time around.

As an audience member you are given a white mask to wear at all times and told to remain silent. From there you are sent down a long dark curtained corridor until you reach a set of stairs and climb up into the world of Poe. You can explore the maze like building freely where each room has been intricately transformed into anything from an opium den to the study of a stately manor. The authentic environment and oppressive Poe-esque mood is all around you not just on a screen or stage, so it can really feel like you’ve stepped back in time and are part of this world.

The actors mostly ignore your voyeuristic presence as they play out their scenes around you except for brief and often terrifying or exhilarating moments of eye contact or touch. It’s a very strange feeling as you become a stalker trailing performers from room to room seeing what they do next. It’s your choice which rooms to explore and which actors to follow and that’s what makes the experience your own. Sometimes you can catch the final scene of a dramatic encounter with no idea what brought the character here and are left to fill in the blanks yourself. I’ve been twice now and have tickets one more time before the end of the run and with each visit I’ve discovered more rooms, more stories and other perspectives on the same stories by following different characters. You’re discouraged from traveling with friends, and if you follow that instruction then swapping anecdotes in the fabulous party at the finale is fascinating as everyone has different stories to tell.

Dreams No Mortal Ever Dared to Dream Before

The reason I write this blog is because I am fascinated by the ways stories can be made to be interactive, and typically this is about how you as the audience can affect a story being played out. However Punchdrunk have focused on a different kind of interaction, they have built a living breathing world of Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction where interactivity comes through exploration and discovery. It’s a very different spin on the idea than I’m used to and with the quality of the performances and the setting it’s one that has made a very strong impact upon me. Ultimately interactive storytelling is about giving the audience choice in what they get out of the experience and they have succeeded in that.

My background is video games and so I couldn’t write about this without drawing some comparisons. Similar concepts to Punchdrunk’s productions can be seen in a lot of a video games. “Free thinking” characters moving around the world independent of the player can be seen in everything from the 1992 adventure game Lure of the Temptress through to the 2006 RPG Oblivion, though generally the characters are just simulating real life and not taking part in dramatic stories. A closer comparison could probably be drawn with titles of the Interactive Movie era of gaming like Night Trap where you could switch freely between CCTV cameras in rooms around a house watching events unfold. The problem with using pre-recorded video was that player interaction was very limited and designers had to come up with ways to make the games interesting without letting the players affect the outcome of the live action footage.

Interactive movies were of course a critical and commercial failure. Personally I wonder if something good could have come from the genre if there had been an attempt to tell some really good stories instead of campy b-movies. However the general critical opinion seemed to be that gamers demanded more direct interaction with the game and if that’s the case then maybe this kind of voyeuristic storytelling that works so well theatrically couldn’t really translate to other mediums. Non the less I’m pretty sure sandbox worlds like GTA and Oblivion would be much more fascinating if many of the generic characters walking around the streets had their own interesting stories they were playing out. Maybe for it to be practical it would have to be on a bit of a smaller scale that those two examples but the potential is there.

Where Thy Dark Eye Glances

Ultimately The Masque of the Red Death is nothing new; Punchdrunk have been performing promenade theatre since 2000 and we’ve had similar concepts in video games for over a decade. What makes The Masque of the Red Death special is not originality, but execution. They’ve taken an old building and created a wonderful simulation of a gothic world filled with the morbid tales of Edgar Allan Poe. I loved the time I spent in that world and will be very sad when my final trip ends.

In case you’re not familiar with any of Poe’s stories I thought I’d end with these links to YouTube videos of three animated adaptations. There’s a really good short film version of The Black Cat by Rob Green on the DVD of his film The Bunker but sadly no one’s put it up on YouTube.

The Raven - A surprisingly good adaptation from a Halloween episode of The Simpsons.

Tell Tale Heart - A beautiful animated version made in the 50’s.

The Masque of the Red Death (Part 1, Part 2) - An illustrated reading of the story from The Dark Eye, an old adventure game about the works of Poe.