The line started inching forward like DC’s Red Line during Safetrack, letting in just 4 or 5 people at a time. It was like a rock concert, with the line and wait increasing anticipation much the same way New York’s line is set-up, although lacking a bouncer IDing everyone (special shout-out to the USA’s perverse drinking age). The line stretched back along the entire side of the building, out almost on to the street, Beijing Xi Lu. While waiting in line, one could also check one’s belongings in a small locker room to the side, for a small fee of course, but nonetheless a great addition. Most notably, the building selected for this version of the show is not a warehouse like New York’s purposefully pretty sketchy venue, but a converted office building with sophisticated signs dotting the exterior, illuminating the location as if it were a real hotel. Ironically in the vein of Macbeth, my own hubris blinded me as I tried to outsmart the show, but I am happy to report that even if it’s your third or millionth time seeing Sleep No More, there are still surprises and new discoveries waiting for you.Īfter a pleasant fifteen-minute walk almost being run over by countless motor-scooters on the sidewalks of downtown, I arrived at this “McKinnon Hotel” about an hour early, eager to continue my Chinese theatre journey. You wander the endless maze-like rooms and corridors in the throng of this undulating mass of a masked audience, yourself in your own mask, encountering these random scenes of love, hate, misery, violence, affection, happiness, and despair enacted wordlessly through intense physical vignettes by the cast-and sometimes by lucky audience participants.īut none of this was new information to me in fact, I found myself numb to the shock-value of many scenes and the novelty of it all, my experience tainted by a scholarly lens laser-focused on comparing the production to that of New York. The soundtrack is broken jazz and Alfred Hitchcock recordings that crescendo and abate in volume and intensity throughout the show, reverberating in your core as your heartbeat pounds in your ears this is after all, like exploring a haunted house or your own level of Until Dawn where anything can happen at any time. Over everything looms this heavy haze and dust, pierced with strobes and lasers illuminating the shadows and dark corners of which there are many.
#Sleep no more running time free#
The rooms abound in abandoned letters and books, antiques and toys, furniture, bric-a-brac and miscellany, like a Satanic garage sale, universally heralded as perhaps the best part of the whole production as you’re free to touch and read any and every detail. It’s like a real-life video game tableau with cemeteries, sanitariums, dingy hotel rooms, apartments, and drawing rooms, infirmaries, libraries, taxidermy shops, and a ballroom. The set design throughout the five-story building is astounding. It’s “choose-your-own-adventure” but on drugs.
The production is staged to a masked audience, about 400 people deep, who are free to wander the five floors according to their own whims, encountering random scenes on the fly and chasing - literally, sprinting - after 30 actors as they fly up and down the stairs, scene to scene. The entirely dialogue-free piece incorporates modern dance and mime with intricate, cinematic-quality installation stage design, a huge sound system, and laser and strobe lighting. A quick introduction for those of you still sleeping on this life-changing show from UK’s Punchdrunk:Ī massive production of “interactive theater” (those who know me, know my feelings on this beat-to-death term…) based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Sleep No More is staged over five floors of set and runs for three hours without intermission. This being my third time seeing this play (play? Experience?), I was more than happy to drop more money than I definitely should have to see more than the piece itself, but the differences and similarities facing a familiar production reproduced in a new country and culture– sold out for the whole current run I might add. If having an unfamiliar language swirl around you while you cling desperately to what little Google services you can somehow still access and being squished in high-tech metro cars crammed like sardines in the world’s most populous city (你好 24 million new friends!) sounds like your ideal vacation, run to see Sleep No More, now playing at “The McKinnon Hotel” in Shanghai. I want to go on-record and say the thrill and fear of solo traveling for the sake of seeing a show you care about never grows wearisome.
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