Punchdrunk and Bowers & Wilkins combine to deliver more intimate theatre

Punchdrunk is the ground-breaking immersive theatre company that ripped up the rules of traditional theatrical entertainment. For over two decades, it has pioneered a unique form of theatrical performance that places the audience at the heart of the action.

Famed for its iconic ‘mask’ shows, which re-wrote the rules of immersive entertainment, under the helm of its visionary founder and creative director Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk is continuously pushed the boundaries, always exploring new ways of re-igniting audience members’ child-like sense of fun and exploration. 

They are the best in the game and highly protective over their hard-won reputation. This is why, when Punchdrunk decided to explore the possibility of a uniquely audio-focused experience, they approached Bowers & Wilkins, with the ambition to further elevate the listening experience. 

The collaboration was an immediate success, as award-winning Sound Designer Gareth Fry explains. “The Bowers & Wilkins headphones elevate the whole experience. We did some test runs and mixing with some lower-quality headphones, but when we got the Px7 S2s we were all blown away by what they brought – and how it elevated everything. It was a real pivotal moment.” 

Viola’s Room – a unique, audio-led immersive experience

Viola’s Room demands great sound. Because unlike the many of Punchdrunk’s previous productions, most of the action takes place not in front of your eyes, but enters through your ears. There’ll be no spoilers here – because the production looks set to move onto new locations – but suffice it to say small groups of six people make their way around Punchdrunk’s Woolwich, London HQ, wearing Bowers & Wilkins Px7 S2 headphones for an incredibly intimate, highly immersive experience.

Adapted from the book written by Booker-prize nominee Daisy Johnson and featuring the instantly recognisable voice of BAFTA-winning actor Helena Bonham Carter, Viola’s Room is a spooky, dimly-lit experience that relies on narration and expert creative sound design to create a rich, immersive experience. 

That’s why Punchdrunk Creative Director Felix Barrett turned to the very best, in the form of Gareth Fry, a sound designer whose impressive credits stretch from the recent Macbeth production at Donmar Warehouse, and the V&A’s David Bowie Is, to the truly sensational opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

“The creative challenges, which is normally the hard part, were actually really easy,” Felix says. “Because Gareth's such a genius. He knows how to make a sound appear to be two miles away, then roll in like a tidal wave of noise. That's the great thing about having a killer team.”

A former recording engineer, Gareth is, of course, obsessive about sound quality, which is why he was so keen to work with Bowers & Wilkins on Viola’s Room.

“Through my work, I have discovered that sound is a very visceral thing,” Gareth says. “The beauty of a performance, as opposed to working in the studio, is that you get to both create the sound and then experience how people respond to it, the joy it brings them, or the tears. And with that feedback, improve and iterate what you've done to make it even better and connect with them even more.”

As well as Helena Bonham Carter’s voice, music plays a major part in the production, setting scenes and dragging up nostalgic memories. Gareth praises Felix and co-director Hector Harkness’ ability to select the perfect music for the moment in order to suggest a situation or evoke an emotion, and it’s then his job to place that music in the soundscape to the best possible effect.

There’s no ‘spatial’ audio as such in the production. Instead, Gareth uses innovative mixing and recording techniques alongside his extensive expertise to create a wonderfully enveloping experience. It works without recourse to spatial technology – which makes sense because, at its heart, mixing is a true art form in itself. 

Audio-led entertainment

Even for a sound designer as prestigious as Gareth, it was an exciting challenge to have audio as the central pillar of the storytelling. “It was really exciting to have sound as the driving force,” he says. “And to look at how we could develop that and take it beyond just listening to a piece of music and hearing somebody speak to thinking about how that might be spatialised, and how one thing might lead into the other and create the arc of the soundtrack.”

Sound is a vital element to any Punchdrunk show, as Felix says: “Any show I do in any discipline, even with the TV stuff, the soundtrack comes first.” But in Viola’s Room, the sound is so important it almost becomes a character in its own right. “There's no cast apart from Helena,” Felix explains. “So her voice is taking you by the hand and leading you deep inside the labyrinth. The sound is doing everything: the sound is a performer; it's the story, it's presence, it's ghost, it's echo, it's all of the above.”

“Gareth's depth of sound design is immense,” he enthuses. “There are parts you can't quite hear, and we deliberately made it so that you almost have to lean to hear the detail. You know it's there, but your ears are striving to hear it, then it elevates, and then it takes you by the hand.

“What the Bowers & Wilkins headphones have provided us with is incredible depth. It gives me so much joy when I go through and watch members of the audience lift their headphones because they assume that the sound actually playing in the room as well. Having that quality is really transformative for the performance.”

The recording techniques involved were extensive and all incredibly deliberate. The sound was recorded in both stereo and mono and shifts between them, for example. “We recorded it with both a normal microphone and an ASMR, binaural microphone. Flipping between these two different recording techniques keeps the audience on their feet. So they can acclimatise to a certain pattern of listening, and suddenly Helena whispers in your ear, and it jumps you out of your comfort zone.”

The immersive nature of headphones

Both Gareth and Felix are adamant that sound quality plays a central role in the success of the production. “The sound of the music is the central emotional driver of the pieces; it’s how everybody connects with the characters that you need sonically,” Gareth explains. “Without the sound quality that we've got with the Bowers & Wilkins headphones, I think the whole experience would be significantly diminished.”

The Px7 S2 wireless headphones proved ideal for the immersive nature of the performance because, unlike speakers in a live experience, with headphones everyone gets the same acoustic experience, no matter where in the space they are standing. 

“There’s something about being enclosed in your own world that really ignites the imagination,” Felix says. “I’m not sure Viola’s Room would work as effectively with speakers because there’s a dreamlike quality to being locked in your own, rather claustrophobic, world. There’s a level of control and intimacy that really makes the Px7 S2s work.”

On a practical level, the sound overspill caused by speakers in such a confined environment would have been problematic because there are not just the six people in your group experiencing it, but other groups at five-minute intervals ahead of you.

Headphones also make the production more inclusive because audience members in the same party can listen to different versions of the same soundtrack. As a visitor, you can choose to hear the regular version, a dialogue-enhanced version, where the music and sound effects duck to a very low level whenever there's any dialogue, which is ideal for anybody with hearing issues, or you choose the audio-described version of the soundtrack.

Viola’s Room has had a sensational eight-month run in London, including a limited-run festive-themed version of the experience. Keep an eye out for future productions at https://www.punchdrunk.com.