For Madmen Only!
Performer Fania Grigoriou photographed by Julian Abrams
“This little theater of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you please, ten or a hundred or a thousand and behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you…but it would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are…you are therefore requested to lay these spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly esteemed personality here in the cloakroom where you will find it again when you wish.”
I have been envious of this scene ever since I first came across it in my senior year of high school. It’s from Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf and refers to the protagonist Harry Haller’s descent into his friend Pablo’s surreal magic theater, aptly labeled ‘For Madmen Only!’ It is a place where dreams are supplanted into reality and vice versa; a place where personality is made obsolete. After I reread Hesse’s novel a couple of months ago, my brooding desire to inhabit such a world surfaced as strongly as it did when I was seventeen.
Pablo’s magic theater, once a realm irretrievable from mythology and literature, became my lived experience once I had attended Punchdrunk’s production of The Burnt City. Bathed in the anonymity afforded to us by the plastic white masks we were required to wear, the audience obediently followed Hades as he directed us through Charon’s port and into the unmappable. The play, rooted in Greek tragedy, immerses its audience in the desecrated, dystopian city of Troy and the revenge-fueled land of Argos.
Performer Omagbitse Omagbemi photographed by Julian Abrams
Centered around a promenade experience akin to what psychogeographers call Dérive—‘rapid passage through varied ambiances’—The Burnt City erects a seemingly limitless playground in which the audience can be guided by their intuition, desire, and fear. The performers move between scenes with little to no demarcation as to where the audience stands and they perform. The play is plagued with the unknown: everyone—unless you have ignored Hades’ advice at the beginning to ‘abandon your loved ones’—is lent to a unique experience of innumerable possibilities.
I was awestruck by the suspension of reality I was immersed in; at first, the phantasmagoric scenes that permeated every corner of the play felt disharmonious with the mundanity of rainy London that night. Yet, in the latter part of my experience of the play, I began to wonder whether this was actually a hyperbolized extension of my reality rather than a suspension of it. In what ways was this experience similar to my life outside of it?
The Burnt City sits at the nexus of confusion, disjuncture, and simultaneity. This feature of the play aligns with a truth I have recognized in every city I have lived in: that there is no linear or mappable structure of experience. Metropoles, sociologist George Simmel argued, create a “rapid crowding of images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.” Cities, like The Burnt City, are categorized by the unknowable, the limitless.
The play can be read as a metaphor for the nebulous and ever-changing lives of city dwellers. The artistic director Felix Barret tells me, ‘Like in real life, the audience follows what genuinely compels them and the resulting reaction, we hope, is more engaged, visceral, and emotional. Freeing people up to ‘play’ and truly suspend their disbelief in a densely designed environment deepens the reaction to the work and hopefully results in a profound and lasting response to the experience.”
The monotony and confusion that can overtake daily life in cities can be oppressive. The Burnt City remedies this and advocates for a type of urban navigation, not limited to those who have seen the play, that draws upon playfulness and serendipity to explore the disjointed realities around us. By adopting an attitude of excitement and keen interrogation, we can intangibly re-erect the stage of this play in any city. As I said to my friend one Tuesday afternoon while we were aimlessly wandering around the half-abandoned and spectral stalls at Camden market, “It’s giving The Burnt City.”
Performer Pin Chieh Chen photographed by Julian Abrams
Not only does the play encourage a more emotive and playful engagement with urban space, but provides an admirable blueprint for the future of tragedy as well. While the play deals with unsettling and sometimes fatalistic scenes of tragedy, it also, Barret explains, combines “levity, chaos, and humor into the experience of [the] Peep bar, the entry and exit point for the show.” Following Euripides’ model of the tragicomedy, The Burnt City lets its audience absorb the obscurity of the experience and make light of it in the end. I found this to be one of the most generative features of the play, especially in relation to the growing culture of tragedy that is overly layered in comedic relief.
A couple months ago I saw Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird. I remember feeling immensely put off by the slapstick and irreverent humor interjected into scenes dealing with racial and sexual violence. Tragedy, I thought cynically, has become digestible only if it is saturated in comedy. The Euripidean tragicomedy has been bastardized by the increasing repertoire of tragic narratives such as Sorkin’s To Kill A Mockingbird that focus more on narcotic entertainment rather than sitting with the unsettling realities of our world. This kind of tragedy can be counterintuitive and numb us to the suffering it is meant to display.
This comes as a huge consequence to what tragedy offers. As Helen Thomas argues in “The New Age of Tragedy,” “Denial of our tragic age will only lead to more suffering.” Tragedy allows its audience to recognize the turbulence and pain that is ubiquitous and seek out ways to make it livable. This is where The Burnt City can act as a corrective model to tragic narratives that rely too heavily on comedic relief. By introducing a level of playfulness and humor that doesn’t detract from the tragedy displayed, the play allows us to recognize our ubiquitous sufferings while not being overwhelmed by them. It is not blunted by excessive comedy nor does it fall into a spiral of fatalism. Taken as a guideline for contemporary depictions of tragedy, The Burnt City can direct us towards a more perceptive future.