THE DROWNED MAN: A HOLLYWOOD FABLE
2013 - 2014
In a co-production with the National Theatre, Punchdrunk relocated Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck to Hollywood at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, blending it with Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust and shades of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
I devised the track for the Studio Boss role, creating the character of Leland Madison Stanford, head of Temple Pictures, and Grand Master of the masonic lodge at the heart of the organisation. He engineers the tragic stories played out in and around his studios, in order to satisfy the public’s unconscious desire for spectacles of sex and death.
My prerecorded voice welcomed all visitors on entry into the world of the studios, and was also heard calling the shots on the numerous sound stages where the action unfolded. The final show of the year-long run concluded with Stanford shooting himself in the eye, while his voice continued: “Still rolling… still rolling… Thank you everybody, we’re moving on.”
I wrote the script and recorded the voiceover for the trailer.
I wrote the script and played Mr Stanford in this video advertising the ending of the show’s year-long run, recorded in one take.
A scene from The Drowned Man was replicated in a short film called Lila. Here is an extract. Kath Duggan appears in the title role.
Extract from Tara Isabella Burton’s review of The Drowned Man for Litro Magazine:
“In some cases, the moments of intimacy in The Drowned Man are stronger than ever. My body language doubtless the over-willing “pick me” desperation of a rescue puppy at the pound, I found myself mistaken for a murdered Mary by Zivkovich’s William, examined by a German doctor and invited into encounter after encounter. Yet among these, most striking was my experience with Sam Booth’s magnetic, chillingly erotic studio head, who held out his hand to me in a crowded cinema before leading me on a ten-minute-long voyage into the underbelly of the studio lots, culminating in a lengthy, verbal, tactile “audition” in a private chamber. The interactive encounter was one of the longest I’ve had in a Punchdrunk show – and almost certainly one of the most intense. Most striking of all, however, was the studio head’s implicit offer: stick with me, kid, and I’ll make you a star. As I followed Booth through a series of increasingly disturbing scenes (including the requisite Punchdrunk penis-waving orgy), I felt that I was being offered a relationship beyond the boundaries of a “one-to-one” encounter (at one point, when Booth re-enacted with another character a gesture he’d made to me in the privacy of the audition room, he turned back to me with a smile) – I became less a voyeur, in the typical Punchdrunk sense, than an extra on the studio lot… my own story ever contiguous to, but never approaching, the story of Temple Studios’ stars.”