Susannah Clapp
Sunday March 27, 2005
The Observer
The Firebird Ball Offley Works, London SW9
The Punchdrunk theatre company must have named itself after the effect it has on audiences. Its latest show, The Firebird Ball, draws on Romeo and Juliet and The Firebird; it's performed in a disused factory near the Oval; it gets its spectators to wander through dusky spaces, piecing together a story from the action which flickers around them. It marvellously catches the teasing, eliding, vanishing sensation of dream: it's as if you'd fallen asleep listening to Shakespeare and Stravinsky and imported both into daily life.
A flapper with a cutglass accent guides spectators from a bar, where a band plays and trees prop up the ceiling, through a bead curtain into a nether world. Pacing in the dark past rows of abandoned shelving and a suddenly deserted office, it looks as if nothing is happening.
Then you start to see things. Figures, which from behind look like fellow spectators, turn out to be petrified models, reaching to the sky or bowed among the filing cabinets. A bird-like girl in crimson scampers past, pursued by a young man. Trying to follow her, you climb a flight of stairs and find a white wood, a forest of canvas columns; one tree bears a blossom of feathers.
All around, different stories start up in a space that seems to collapse, expand and distort itself, with the help of switches of light and great gusts of music. In one corner, a picket fence with a neat gravel path leads up to a house: inside, a woman rushes away from her dressing table, leaving a wedding dress swinging in a wardrobe. In another nook, a crop of gravestones glimmers in a blue light, then disappears. In an incense-filled alcove, a priest conducts a wedding (Romeo and Juliet's?); in a confessional, Juliet's father whispers to a priest. And silent, spooky witnesses are everywhere. The audience wear masks: immobile white faces with pendulous noses nod to each other across the animated episodes.