‘Immersion’ is the operative word in the title to this book. Emma Cole immerses her readers in the world of Punchdrunk, the contemporary theatre company known for its maximalist, site-specific approach to immersive theatre, through her autoethnographic analysis of rehearsals and performances of The Burnt City (2022-2024). Cole herself was immersed in the production as scholar, dramaturg, and audience member, and from this fieldwork she fashions her methodology: ‘Spectator-Participation-as-Research’ (mercifully shortened to SPaR). She also identifies elements of immersive experience ‘beyond’ the production, such as those found in the company’s fan communities (Punchdrunk’s so-called ‘extended audiencing’), or in the ancient Greek theatrical tradition that inspires much of Punchdrunk’s work. The book itself is designed primarily for digital perusal, with handy hyperlinks and striking photographic illustrations.
Cole describes her book in terms that place Punchdrunk’s theatre practice within a conventional framework of classical reception studies. ‘Firstly, it seeks to unpack how practitioners draw upon and transform ancient Greek literature for the realisation of immersive experience, and secondly, it seeks to analyse how ancient literature shapes engagement within an immersive experience’ (p. 4). However, Cole explores this reception process in a way that fits Punchdrunk’s unique approach to ancient source material and to what the company defines as ‘collision sources’—that is, other influences, often from contrasting modern media. Her focus and methods end up implicitly suggesting that when it comes to immersive theatre as it is practised by Punchdrunk’s founders, Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, it is in the rehearsal room that classical reception primarily takes place. This celebration of improvisatory rehearsal practice for its capacity to foster creative connection with ancient myth—what Cole prefers to define as mythopoiesis rather than reception—leads to some of the book’s most interesting observations. It is also a helpful reminder to a classicist reader that the book is, at heart, a work that emerges from theatre studies and is designed for a wide readership that includes non-specialists in many of the fields on which the book touches. With that come both frustrations (few) and benefits (many) for a classicist reader.
Organising a book like this is not easy. Cole imposes a strict tripartite structure on her material, with each third of the book further divided into two chapters. The first third of the book introduces readers to Punchdrunk and its history as a theatre company: its oeuvre, its engagement with ancient Greek myths alongside modern technology, its adoption of story loops and audience masks, its development of a gestural language, and its prioritising of abstraction over straightforward storytelling. This section of the book also offers an introduction to the Greek tragic sources used in different ways to construct The Burnt City’s ‘purgatorial looping re-enactment of the Trojan War’ (p. 9): Aeschylus Agamemnon and Euripides Hecuba. The central two chapters engage in a ‘rehearsal ethnography’ of The Burnt City, with an eye to the peculiar circumstances of the work’s production. This is where readers are most fully immersed in the production process, through Cole’s evocative thick description. She documents practical pressures, from the disastrous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic to the challenges and opportunities presented by the Woolwich warehouses in which the production was located. She also zooms in on the development of specific scenes, focusing on how the artists devised choreography that would work as an ‘intermedial translation’ (p. 103) of ancient myth. The sound design is the only element of the production that is given disappointingly short shrift. The final third of the book begins with a performance analysis of The Burnt City. Here Cole explores how the audience’s immersive experience was informed by the historical and fictional layering of space and place in the production, from its location in an old munitions manufacturing district of London, to its recreation of a mythical Underworld. This discussion then expands into a consideration of how modern immersive theatre relates to cultural experiences of immersivity in ancient Greece. Through some consideration of the terms mimesis, enargeia, and ekphrasis Cole embraces not just the immersivity of ancient drama, but also of ancient epic and historiography. A short seventh chapter concludes the book.
Punchdrunk on the Classics contributes to a growing interest in creative practice as research in classical reception studies, and gives a detailed demonstration of how this plays out in the artform that is immersive theatre. Cole is very good at communicating with those who are new to her field. She works with a tight but elastic definition of immersivity, and meticulously spells out her methodologies with all their benefits and their shortcomings—noting, for example, her effort to resist the ‘colonising mentality of ethnography’ (p. 24). Her metaphorical language is nicely pitched to reflect the practical dimension to constructing the production (jigsaw, scaffold, building) as well as the more organic, interpretative connection between the production and its past sources (dialogue, ecology, DNA).
Cole’s case studies provide valuable insight into the Punchdrunk rehearsal process. Chapter four offers a particularly engaging discussion of how the scene portraying the sacrifice of Polyxena was shaped through a complex engagement with ancient texts and rituals. According to Cole, these historical sources were mined primarily to explore the psychology of the mythic characters, even as the scene itself was stripped back to largely non-verbal, choreographed movement. Cole outlines the company’s concerns around the ethics of representing the violence of this scene, and the steps that were taken to mitigate an objectifying audience gaze. Much of this work in the rehearsal space will have been invisible in performance, so this book provides a vital illustration of the interpretative moves that are made during the creative process, long before anything is staged for the public.
Cole also investigates the audience experience in The Burnt City, both through her observation of audience activity and through reflection on her own visits to performances. In her methodology and her analysis Cole explores how the production encouraged subjective responses to the material, as each audience member had to choose how they individually navigated the theatrical space, and some would be involved in private one-on-one scenes. By the same token, Cole does not neglect some of the more shared, collective dimensions to ‘audiencing’ at The Burnt City. She probes Punchdrunk’s use of audience masking, which creates unique opportunities for engagement and vulnerability on the part of the audience, and she lingers on the ‘cross-fade’ experience, in which audiences were moved into and out of the dramatic world of the performance through installations that blurred the lines between reality and make-believe, such as a mock museum exhibition. Even here, though, Cole filters the performance primarily through her individual experience, according to SPaR: ‘Retracing my steps to find my way out of the museum felt impossible’ (p. 155). This kind of commentary does not feel irrelevant. Indeed, audience anecdotes seem to be a natural part of the production’s afterlife. One friend told me that they explored the show by trying not to become separated from the party with whom they’d gone; another confessed that they had stumbled out of The Burnt City early by mistake, and were kicking themselves for having missed the spectacular finale. Even reviewing Cole’s book lent itself to some unique extended audiencing: after accidentally stapling together in the wrong order some pages I had printed out (Palgrave Macmillan would not share a hard copy of the book with reviewers) I suffered a disorientating immersive reading experience of my own until I worked out the problem.
Some of the strengths of Punchdrunk on the Classics are also its weaknesses. The structure that Cole imposes on her material means that she must revisit some of the same elements of the work in rehearsal, in performance, and in wider comparative contexts, requiring a degree of repetition. On the flip side, the book sometimes misses opportunities to make stronger connections across disciplines and theoretical approaches. There is a lightness of touch when it comes to engaging with scholarship which makes the book highly readable, but risks leaving some readers itching for more evidence of the wider academic conversations that inform and extend its interpretations. This feeling is exacerbated for classicists by Cole’s decision to postpone to the penultimate chapter her discussion of what might be defined as ancient Greek immersive experiences. It means that much of her earlier analysis of the Punchdrunk scenography, even as it makes the case for a resonance between past and present performance, feels oddly detached from the extensive research that has been done by classicists on the site-specific and affective dimensions of ancient theatre. It is also marked in the sections of the book where Cole addresses the work’s choreography. On the one hand she offers a compelling examination of Punchdrunk performers harnessing the language of dance. On the other hand, beyond glancing at the rituals of the Brauronia, Cole does not situate her account of the choreography within a broader consideration of ancient dance forms and functions (from archaic choreia to imperial pantomime) or of other modern dance works that operate as receptions of ancient myth—both of which have been subject to an explosion of work over the past twenty years.
Of course, this is to ask a lot of a short book that already packs a lot into a small space. Doubtless many of these connections will be explored further in the author’s new edited volume, Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity: from Narrative to Virtual Reality. As it stands, Punchdrunk on the Classics offers us an important study of the ways in which classical reception can be diffused throughout the creative processes that shape immersive theatre. In doing so it has made a powerful case for embedding classical scholarship in the production of contemporary performing arts, and vice versa.