PRODUCTION FEATURE THEATRE SOUND
Actors Fernanda Prata and Jesse Kovarsky play out a scene. Photo by Birgit & Ralf.
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The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable
Punchdrunk
The latest offering from award-winning production company Punchdrunk, The Drowned Man is a macabre tale of love, lust, and jealousy set in 1960s Hollywood. Jory MacKay sat down with sound designer Stephen Dobbie to find out how much of a role sound plays in the company’s most ambitious production.
LEAVINGTHE busy streets of Central London and walking through the twisting maze of pitch-black hallways that lead to Temple Studios – the fictional 1960s Hollywood studio complex where Punchdrunk’s latest production, The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, is set – your eyes take a few moments to adjust to the engulfing darkness. Yet even before the pinpoint lighting begins to register, an ominous pulsating tone booms throughout the building preparing each visitor for the experience to come. The Drowned Man is the latest of Punchdrunk’s ‘site-
32 October 2013
specific’ productions where the audience is free to roam through a massive, fully immersive environment. Unlike traditional theatre (or cinema for that matter) there are no breaks, cuts, or scene changes. Audience members act as their own camera, piecing together bits of the narrative by following actors, reading letters, or just exploring the location. The only guidelines are no talking and don’t take off the white mask you’re required to wear while in the building – two rules designed to help visitors lose their inhibitions and freely investigate all the site and the show has to offer.
Over Punchdrunk’s near
15-year history, sound and music have always been used to add to a show’s atmosphere, yet it wasn’t until the critically acclaimed Sleep No More, which opened in 2011 in New York, that the group decided to expand its sonic offering. “When we did Sleep No
More the scope for music grew and there was this desire to have different soundtracks playing in different parts of the building simultaneously,” explains Punchdrunk’s Stephen Dobbie who first got involved with the company in 2001 as a graphic designer before taking on the role of sound designer.
A trained photographer,
Dobbie’s beginnings in the audio world came through DJing and working with some of the first samplers on the market (he proudly still owns a Yamaha SU10). The idea of piecing short sections of audio together to create something new was ingrained in him early on and is still a technique that he uses when putting together the soundtracks for Punchdrunk productions. “The concept [for Sleep No
More] was very clear; it was Macbeth seen through the eye of a sort of Hitchcockian lens, so there was a ready-made score there with all the great
Bernard Herrmann stuff for Hitchcock’s earlier films,” he adds. “It became just a case of cherry picking the best bits and fusing them with sound design and sound effects.” For The Drowned Man, the
concept was less clear. Loosely based on Georg Büchner’s fractured (and incomplete) play, Woyzeck, in which a 19th-century German soldier brutally murders his unfaithful wife in a crime of passion, Dobbie and artistic director Felix Barrett were forced to build the look and sound of Temple Studios without a clearly defined reference point.
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