SLEEP NO MORE

Yesterday night, I attended a production of "Sleep No More." This was a fantastic sensory and theatrical experience and very hard to explain.

The British theatre company that puts on this show is called Punch Drunk and the show is based on Shakespeare's Macbeth.

We arrived at the McKittrick Hotel at 7:45 and were led into the fabulous Manderley Bar. A place that looked a lot like Twin Peaks' One Eyed Jack's brothel. The drink of choice in this bar is absinthe - you will need a shot of courage before entering this place so why not the green fairy?




I was immediately seperated from my companion  and taken into  a "briefing" room with a group of people. We were all given a white mask to wear for the preformance and told not to speak for the duration of the show. Then the group was taken into an elevator and enters the show. Basically the idea is to explore the set (which is the entire McKittrick Hotel) on your own and to create your own theatrical experience.

 It was creepy, macabre, and dreamlike. I wandered through rooms of clawfoot bathtubs, hospital beds, a forest of dead branches and taxidermied animals, a cemetary with eerie statuary...
You are encouraged to open drawers and search through files, even eat candy in the candy store if you chose. As you explore you will encounter actors who enact key scenes from Macbeth silently but through hyperkinetic dance moves.

Macbeth and Lady MacBeth plotting murder, the three witches (crazy strobe lights and a naked man with the head of a goat) and the dinner where MacBeth sees the ghost of the murdered king.







After the show you can retire to the Manderley bar, listen to some jazz and blues, have a drink and try to process all that you just saw.

Here's the website for the production: www.sleepnomore.com