The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable – review

The problem with an immersive company like Punchdrunk is that people tend to take fixed attitudes: either they are a signpost to the theatrical future or they take one on a footslogging journey through unsatisfying fragments. But as a pragmatist I'd argue that their work is as variable as anyone else's, and their new show, co-produced with the National Theatre, strikes me as vastly better than their operatic Duchess of Malfi (2010) without quite achieving the gothic splendour of The Masque of the Red Death (2007).

As so often with Punchdrunk, the choice of location is inspired. Here they have found a disused sorting office next to Paddington station and turned it into a Hollywood studio outpost filled with the tawdry magic of the moviemaking past. As spectators, we trace our own path through the four sound stages lovingly designed by Felix Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns. On one floor we find a mini-version of small-town America complete with drugstore, saloon, barber's shop and fountain. On another we seem to be on the set of a 1950s teen movie where a girls' dorm, full of teddy bears and cheap frills, is suddenly invaded by quiffed, randy boys. The design everywhere is immaculate down to the copies of Films and Filming that adorn a studio that was supposedly a branch of the notoriously parsimonious Republic Pictures.

But what of the dramatic action? We discover this for ourselves but we learn in advance (from a synopsis handed out on entry) that it involves parallel stories, based on Buchner's Woyzeck, of love and destruction. In one the impoverished William murders the faithless Mary, while in the other the ferocious Wendy bumps off the errant Marshall. Maybe because the floor levels are not indicated clearly enough, I found myself catching more of the latter than the former. I saw Marshall rolling about in choreographed abandon with the studio diva. I also saw Wendy leading her lover up a hilly incline prior to his dispatch. Rather unnervingly, she then stared intently into my eyes (we all wear white masks) and uttered the word "Marshall" as if I was his embodiment.

All this is intriguing, and clearly the intention of the directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle (who also choreographs) is to blur the border between illusion and reality so that we're never sure whether we're watching a hammy Hollywood melodrama or a simulation of life. But that does a disservice to Buchner's original play, a fragmented masterpiece that is much less a lurid crime passionel than a study of a working-class hero driven to desperation by sexual jealousy, poverty and hunger induced by his work as a scientific guinea pig. In short, there is a social dimension to the play that gets lost when it's treated simply as a heated movie scenario of the kind that might once have starred William Bendix or Barbara Stanwyck.

But it's hard to legislate about a show where everyone will have a different experience. For me, the best moments were often the smallest. At one point I found myself in a cramped office inhabited by a bored studio secretary sitting at an ancient typewriter and surrounded by dusty scripts. The setting perfectly captured the desolation of the marginalised movie functionary. The shock came when the secretary, a seductive figure with a Louise Brooks hairdo, looked up from filing her nails to snog – in so far as one can someone wearing a mask – one of the male onlookers. That says a lot about a show in which voyeurism is as important as Woyzeck and which reminds us that the movies turn us all into guilty spectators of other people's lusts.

• Punchdrunk
• Immersive theatre
• National Theatre
• Theatre
• reviews

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