The Drowned Man, Bioshock And The Future Of Art

When I saw Punchdrunk's latest so-hot-right-now show The Drowned Man a few months back, my immediate review via Facebook status was "basically like playing a game of Bioshock with fewer weapons and more nudity". It only occurred to me a few minutes later that the cross-section of my friends who had played Bioshock and seen The Drowned Man might be quite small, and I could probably chalk this up as another joke that sounded clever at the time, but ended up just making me look weird. Is there a large overlap between gamers and theatre-geeks? I don't know, but I think there's much to be learned in both directions.

Sorry if no one has a clue what I'm going on about. This post is going to be quite esoteric, focussing in as it does on a specific game and a specific theatrical piece. But it's worth seeing if there's any cross-pollination that can be done. To recap: The Drowned Man is the latest "immersive" theatre piece from the famed company Punchdrunk. Immersive means you just wander around a massive environment alone and have to piece together the story being told for yourself, either by watching the performances of the actors who occasionally turn up in the various rooms to perform scenes, or by going looking for "secrets" yourself, such as hidden rooms, the letters of characters in drawers, one-on-one segments with actors that only you can access, if you know how.

Lots has been written in various blogs about the show, and I won't attempt much of a review of the show here. But for now I'd like to compare it at more length to the game Bioshock. Now, unfortunately such illustrative videos as I can find on YouTube are played by gamers more interested in slaughtering everything as quickly as possible than the theatrical qualities of the work, but I'll post the opening anyway so you can get a sense of what it all looks like.

No gaming moment I have come across has equalled that feeling you get after having surfaced at 1:20 and suddenly realising you're in control without so much as a by-your-leave. I ended up bobbing up and down for a good minute before realising I was going to have to get myself out of the water. Hitting you with a sudden disconcerting experience and then forcing you immediately to take control: it's the stuff of intelligent immersion, and a slightly less fiery version can be found at the start of The Drowned Man when you're unceremoniously separated from your group (I won't spoil anything) and left in an alien environment with nothing but your wits and a very basic sense of backstory.

In Bioshock you start with absolutely nothing, and are forced to piece together the disaster that has befallen the city of Rapture through a series of audio diaries left by its citizens. Watching the opening murder of a crazed Splicer through a pane of glass without knowing its context or being able to do anything about was replicated in my experience of DM when I witnessed a murder very early on, a creepy half-obscured strangulation that made no sense to me until a little later. It doesn't help that everyone around you is alien in both pieces: everyone in Rapture is genetically spliced to the point of insanity and the audience of DM are forced to wear large birdlike white masks to prevent interaction between us. In these two environments you are alone, and because you are the one doing the exploring, you bear all the responsibility for the scares you get. In either case, you could just go and wimper in a corner for three hours, something you can't do in The Woman in Black (theatrical or cinematic).

Though a friend of mine felt that Punchdrunk had got stuck in this horror/creepout mindset, I can't deny that the horror element was incredibly successful. A certain scene involving a suddenly walking scarecrow in DM was one of the best theatrical sleights of hand I have ever seen, while stumbling across a hidden study in which a "murdered " scarecrow sat slumped at the desk surrounded by pages of the Bible condemning homosexuality and adultery nailed into the wood by nail scissors was a fantastically odd and disturbing experience. But it also is an experience I could only get because I understood the video game milieu. I immediately ran around looking for hidden rooms and secret passages, desperately trying to interact with the actors and get secret cutscenes (one of which was remarkably sexy) as a reward. Non game-players simply didn't have this immediate response to the show, which I think lost them a lot of experience points.

Go and join in the unexplained shagging! Or don't, as you wish.

There is a larger point to be made here. Both of these pieces deal with weighty themes. Bioshock is, outside the generic horror/shooter confines, an impassioned response to Ayn Rand and Nietzschan ubermensch ideology, portraying a world so devoted to heroic individualism it collapsed into gentically modified anarchy. The Drowned Man is an adaptation of Buchner's unfinished masterpiece Woyzeck, dealing with madness, jealously and poverty. Now, the question of how much of either of these thematic undertones actually came through is vital to the future of a great deal of art, it seems to me.

On the one hand you have Bioshock, in which the story was there if you wanted it, but you were mainly concerned with the more pressing issue of what combination of lightning plasmid and shotgun would best take out a Big Daddy. On the other we have DM, where the story was there assuming you were extremely good at very efficiently hoovering up details, moving fast, discovering secrets, choosing which dance pieces to follow etc. But this sequence of tasks distracts you from the ability to engage with the material as surely as if Shakespeare prefaced each scene with "There are exactly 19 interesting things to notice in this scene, and you have to get all of them to move on". In other words, in both pieces the action of "playing" the piece was fundamentally detrimental to thinking about it or gaining any commentary on the themes it dealt with. This is a problem that will have to be dealt with at some point, by both games and theatre. Simply being immersed into an environment does not mean you'll gain anything from it, and may well distract from anything artistically coherent you could find in it.

I think there's a lot of mileage in treating literature as games. I think the ability to affect what is going on in front of you has enormous potential for reimagining the body of work we have inherited. Spec Ops: The Line, for instance, puts Heart of Darkness in a new light by suggesting that Kurtz's journey is inevitable for anyone, including you the player, who has enough orders and immediate goals in front of them that they forget their humanity. But starting with Punchdrunk, immersive theatre has to find a clear way of making the "player" reinterpret the work for themself, through their actions, so the literary basis is neither substantially changed nor lost under procedural baggage. That and giving the audience members a grenade launcher or two, perhaps.