The Duchess of Malfi, Great Eastern Quay, Monday 19th July

It was dark, I was frightened, and somewhere quite close to me a large naked man was singing.

Never having been to a production by immersive theatre company Punchdrunk, and extraordinarily lucky to get my hands on a ticket for their operatic attempt at The Duchess of Malfi after huge demand crashed their collaborator, ENO's website, I approached the venue, an abandoned office block at the less salubrious end of the Docklands Light Railway with a fair degree of trepidation. Upon entering, one is provided with a mask and immediately plunged into darkness, instructed to wander at will. It's a dislocating experience, and necessary to screw one's courage to the sticking point just to keep walking towards the distant light - the audience travel in packs for safety. It's a fair representation of the atmosphere of Webster's work, a threatening environment where much is obscured, and to be alone is to be in danger. We formed tenuous loyalties to wander (still mostly in darkness) through empty lycanthropy research labs, a church, bedrooms, a bar, a study, an echoing hall, a forest of tangled cable trees and flights of sheet music. My wanderings were scored by unnerving hints of the score by Torsten Rasch. This was a promising start, until I took a wrong turn in the dark somewhere, and emerged in the gents' toilet. I inspected the facilities carefully, but as they did not seem immediately relevant to the plot, I continued.

As part of Punchdrunk's decision to abandon notions of linearity (read: narrative coherence) there is no clear start or finish to the opera, and one simply walks around the various spaces in the hope of stumbling on a scene. Or follows an increasingly irate cellist, on the basis that maybe he know's where he's going because I sure as hell don't. The problem with this is that you can watch the same scene two or three times at half hour intervals, while developing a nagging feeling that you're missing something important elsewhere in the office block. Also, unless you are very familiar with the story (and considering the number of productions this year has seen, there's not much excuse if you're not) you'd be rather at sea. I watch the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the Cardinal poisoning Julia, then Cariola murdered, then the death of one of the Duchess and Antonio's children, then Duchess forbidden to marry, then some sort of repentant moment involving Bosola, then the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the Cardinal poisoning Julia, then the death of one of the Duchess and Antonio's children, then Ferdinand fornicating with a male courtier dressed in the Duchess' clothes, then the Duchess and Antonio discovered by Ferdinand, then the madness of Ferdinand (brave nudity on the part of Andrew Watts), then the final denouement. I also spent about an hour lost. About two hours in, I was desperate to find the bar I'd seen earlier. I never did.

Ultimately, this is a flawed vision; Webster's tragedy are plot heavy, and by reducing the thing to roughly an hour of libretto, that can be repeated in fragments over the course of a gruelling number of hours (presumably even more gruelling for the actors, who manage very physical performances and opera singing), the audience have little chance of anything more than glimpses of motivation or character development. Punchdrunk and ENO end up performing a scattered masque of murderers, albeit one which honours the spirit of Webster's masterpiece. I have no idea how they managed it, but eventually we are all herded together into a cavernous hangar to witness the performance's death throes. Claudia Huckle (as the Duchess), who probably didn't get into opera with the intention of hanging mostly naked upside down over her audience does a fine job at it.

By this point I was tired, footsore, hungry, and still desperate for a drink. I had been by turns lost, frightened, lonely and confused. And this is why, despite every nasty thing I've said here, Punchdrunk are excellent. With the Duchess hanging dead above us, the curtain along one wall sweeps back to reveal three more shrouded, hanging bodies. But they don't stop. The curtains along each huge wall quiver for a moment, then continue, leaving us surrounded, hanging in a mist that seems to continue off into the distance, by dozens and dozens of dangling corpses. It is breathtaking, absolutely cathartic, and a horrifying revelation of Webster's vision. It's perfect.

The Duchess of Malfi, New Players Theatre, Tuesday 4th May

The Duchess of Malfi's getting a good airing at the moment, in Greenwich, here under the arches of Charing Cross, and later in the year with a collaborative operatic treatment from English National Opera and scary interactive theatrical groundbreakers Punchdrunk. Greenwich stuck to a predictable, if effective, fascist-lite setting, and I have absolutely no idea what dark madness to expect from Punchdrunk. Vaulting Ambition, at the New Players, went with...the circus. It could have worked - perhaps some kind of totalitarian ringmaster regime? But it doesn't stick, and a Cardinal is still a Cardinal, even if he's Cardinaling in spangly pants. Only a few of the performers are circus trained; they are mesmerising enough to completely detract at times from the action of the play, and talented enough to make the main actors' attempts at circus stylings seem woefully inadequate. The only real gift of the design is to James Sobol Kelly as Bosola, whose pancake make-up creeps across his face, becoming more and more skull-like as he piles up the body-count. He's a grisly Buster Keaton, a haunted outsider in this production, and it's a testament to the greatness of the writing that this interpretation works as well as any of the other, more macho portrayals I've seen. Just when I thought I couldn't find clowns any more frightening...
The design's a pity - there are some excellent performances, and the production could have stood up perfectly well without the big-top malarkey. The whole Malfi family seem creepily intimate, making Ferdinand's advances to the Duchess easier to reconcile, and our Cardinal, Andrew Piper is quite clearly after Alan Rickman's job. Alinka Wright's a very foxy Julia, who provides an excellent counterpoint to Tilly Middleton's Duchess, whose wooing of Antonio is charmingly tentative, for all her insistence. There are some nice touches in terms of costume design - Alex Humes' werewolf turn is greatly helped by leather and fur, and the lighting is innovative.
With circus arts enjoying a renaissance of their own at the moment, it does them a disservice to crowbar them into renaissance drama. If you want circus, get yourself over to the Roundhouse. Better yet, get thyself to Circus Space and learn how to do it yourself.