The Burnt City

Woolwich Arsenal, London Docklands                  Until December 4, 3hrs

Rating:

Punchdrunk’s latest ‘immersive’ show is staged in a vast warehouse at the Woolwich Arsenal. A dimly lit, dusty museum exhibition, where you squint at ancient artefacts in the gloaming, is the starting gate for this odyssey into the world of Homer’s Iliad.

Over your Covid mask you have to put on a plastic mask like those worn by actors in Greek tragedies. It’s sweaty and hard to see or navigate. If you ask the ushers where to go they say, annoyingly, ‘Let Fate be your guide’.

But as Punchdrunk fans proclaim, the show is not about knowing anything. It’s all about the ride.

Troy’s town square has a cafe, a bar, a dress shop and a cinema. The Greek camp (through a checkpoint) is bleak, with wire and soldiers in greatcoats. Rooms lead to other rooms. Actors with the muscles of acrobats writhe in slow motion.

Hecuba and Agamemnon are obvious but no one else in the cast is; name tags would help.

There’s no dialogue. It’s apparently based on Euripides’ slaughter-fest play Hecuba and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. But as an experience it is curiously short on the grieving, hand-on-mouth horror of those ancient plays.

There are moments of grandeur, though. For example, a frantic charleston dance leads down a staircase to a human sacrifice on a huge steel girder. There’s a rivulet of blood down the woman’s neck. The gods are propitiated.

It’s staged magnificently to Hans Zimmer-like music.

It is not a show for those who dislike feeling lost. I shuffled into an antler-strewn chamber where two women writhed and then dropped my specs in the sand. Elsewhere a couple draped themselves in crimson offal – messy.

In one of several boudoirs there was a bed covered in soft toy owls. What by the beard of Zeus is it all about? It’s not an evening with answers – or an interval. The cast judder to techno music in a thundering finale.

I came out unimmersed and footsore but marvelling at the designs.