Immersive theatre has returned to London stages in different forms for more than a decade: masked promenade shows in found buildings, family productions that cast the audience as the protagonist, and fringe experiments that turn pubs and basements into sets. Made in Shoreditch has spoken to people who make that work, including Punchdrunk co-directors Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle and, more recently, Steve McCourt of Punchdrunk Enrichment.
This feature draws on those archive interviews. It does not invent new quotes. Venue facts that matter for readers, including where Punchdrunk staged The Drowned Man, are corrected against primary sources.
Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett on masks and making the audience part of the story
Punchdrunk built its reputation on large-scale masked shows in found buildings. In July 2015 Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle spoke to Made in Shoreditch about the photography book of The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable, their National Theatre co-production that ran from 2013 to 2014.
Barrett said Punchdrunk started from “a desire to explore new ways of engaging with an audience” and that the work was “not a rejection” of conventional theatre. “The most interesting moment came when we introduced masks, suddenly inhibition fell away and people began to exist in the stories they were watching. They became part of things.”
On how ideas arrive, he said: “It could be a conversation over dinner that sparks something, it could be reading a book, it could be seeing a picture somewhere.” Doyle described giving photographer Julian Abrams free rein of the set because Punchdrunk often works from images. Read the 2015 Barrett and Doyle interview.
The Drowned Man was not an East London show. Punchdrunk and the National Theatre staged it at Temple Studios, a former Royal Mail sorting office at 31 London Street, next to Paddington station. Official London Theatre announced the Paddington site in May 2013. The production opened in June 2013 and closed in July 2014. Earlier Punchdrunk London work had used other found spaces, including a warehouse near Tower Hill for The Masque of the Red Death era of projects, but East London was not the venue for The Drowned Man.
Steve McCourt and Punchdrunk Enrichment’s Fireside Tales
Punchdrunk Enrichment is the company’s strand for work with schools, families and communities. In December 2025 Made in Shoreditch spoke to Steve McCourt as he prepared to become its artistic director, around the opening of Fireside Tales.
McCourt said the show began with a provocation from founding artistic director Pete Higgin “to celebrate the age-old tradition of sharing stories around a fire”. He described fire as a metaphor for imagination: “Fire is as beautiful as it is fragile — it can dance but is easily doused.”
What marks Enrichment’s approach, he said, is casting the audience as the protagonist. “It’s their job to move the story forward or help with any given task at hand. For most young folk, their first experience of theatre is being sat observing a story. This is an alternative way in.” Read the Steve McCourt interview.
Why the form keeps returning
Other Made in Shoreditch interviews have tracked adjacent forms. John Zaller’s 7 Wonders immersive and Claire Luxton’s work around Frameless show how screen-based and gallery-scale experiences sit beside Punchdrunk’s lineage without copying it. The through-line in the Punchdrunk archive is smaller: a found room, a task for the audience, and a refusal to leave spectators in fixed seats.
Between Barrett’s masked shows and Enrichment’s family work sits a wider London fringe of immersive and site-specific pieces: dance-party musicals in purpose-built basements, one-person comedies in Soho rooms, absurdist village satires in studio theatres. What the Punchdrunk interviews share is a practical claim rather than a manifesto. The audience is asked to move, choose and sometimes act. That demand keeps drawing makers back to warehouses, pubs and rooms that were never designed as theatres. East London still hosts a share of those rooms, from gallery late programmes to pop-up seasons, even when the headline Punchdrunk titles play elsewhere in the city.
For related Made in Shoreditch interviews, see Hamish Greer on Oscar at the Crown, Quentin Beroud on The Statesman and John Zaller on 7 Wonders.