If you are anything like me, don't go and see the Site specific "Sleep No More". By that I mean:
1. If you are lazy.
2. If you are impatient.
3. If you like unfolding patterns.
4. If you are a know it all.
5. If you don't find it fun to watch a tailor sow his pants for 20 minutes.
"Sleep No More" is the re-telling of "Macbeth" at a former loft with four floors, 90 separate areas, a bar, all in in the fictional McKittrick Hotel. The McKittrick Hotel is an awesome space, and I hope they keep it open after the Punchdrunk production of "Sleep No More" meets the long goodbye. I caught Laura Marling there last year -it is awesome.
Meanwhile, get ready for a trip. You put on mask that make it hard to breath if you wear glasses and you wander through darkly lit mazes and pop in and out of rooms and spaces where you run into extremely fit looking athletic actors not wearing masks who, with minimal speech but lotsa balletic movements rush about from room to room, often disappearing entirely (a bitch if you are trying to catch up with them)
So I left after half of the three hour experience and this is what I figured out:
1. A tailor is in love with a woman who doesn't know he's alive..
2. A private detective is sending messages by dead bird.
3. A Satanic ritual.
4. Macbeth naked in a bath covered in blood.
5. Lady Macbeth (I think) playing with Macbeth.
6. This bloke who is really good at Origami.
7. Same bloke dancing with a chick with small boobies (I know this because I saw her in an orgy scene earlier)
8. Lots and lots of penisses (penii???)
9. A woman sleeping.
10. And around 45 minutes of wandering around rooms filled with nasty stuff.
What does it all mean? Well, I am not certain but since its a retelling of Macbeth, I'm guessing it is about a man who kills the King, takes his place, loses a war and all because his wife is an ambitious bitch.
It might not be so fucking annoying if:
1. Shit fucking happened.
2. I hadn't lost my niece half an hour in (remember, we were all wearing masks)
3. The audience weren't such a bunch of tossers.
There is something unseemly and uncomfortable about running after actors all night, being bothered by people in masks who take it way way way way too seriously. One woman in specific, just watching her bop around after a character, inches away from him at any given moment, made me stop in my tracks. It is kinda stupid. Kinda demeaning. I didn't like it at all.
And there isn't really all those many narratives or storylines you can follow, it is you and your luck if you stumble on to some, wow, acting because what it really means is you can miss stuff and not make up for it. While you are studying a typewritten note, somebody is having group sex and you're not seeing it. People are so hungry for something to actually watch, when anything does happen , you are suddenly in the middle of a mosh pit at Bowery Ballroom. My life is stressful enough, thanks, I don't want to spend my leisure time beating on middle-aged Fraus for a closer look at some blokes willie.
The stagecraft behind the show was excellent, the actual rooms a wonder of design, from long lines of baths, to long lines of trees (ready to move, no doubt), hotel lobbys and functioning bars, snooker tables, where a couple performs an erotic pas de deux, to a dancehall. Really, magic.
Better still? The music, piped through the sound system, is classic American pop from the 1930s and 1940s, which would place the action in the 1940s, thoogh the women dress like flappers from time to time. They also use excerpts from Hitchcock movies like "Vertigo". Nice to hear Al Bowly along woth Artie SHaw, Glenn Miller, Peggy Lee and the usual suspects.
Finally, during the orgy/Satanic rites scene, there is some first rate techno by Ed Rush and Optical.
Oddly, I really hated "Sleep No More" much more at the time, in memory it wasn't that terrible and I am thinking, now I know what to expect, of actually trying it again!
The Show: C
The Music: A