LONDON - For his final directing project as a student at the University of Exeter, Felix Barrett had the sort of eureka moment that careers are built on.

Mr. Barrett had chosen Georg Buchner's "Woyzeck," a 19th-century German play that tends to invite experimentation. Mr. Barrett's inspiration was to stage the drama inside an old building and to let audiences meander from room to room, watching different scenes. There was only one problem: Patrons might pay more attention to one another than to the actors.

"Then one morning," Mr. Barrett recalled, "I lay in bed and thought, 'Why not put the audience in masks?' - so they'd become part of the aesthetic and disappear into the whole picture."

In the 13 years since Mr. Barrett's breakthrough, theatergoers wearing Venetian-style masks - and chasing characters through labyrinthine spaces - have become the signatures of his troupe, Punchdrunk. It has created more than a dozen immersive productions, including "Sleep No More," a Macbeth-Hitchcock mash-up that has been a hit show for two years in New York.

Now Mr. Barrett has come full circle back to "Woyzeck" in a new adaptation, "The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable," in a co-production with the National Theater here. The Buchner story - about a mistreated soldier descending into murderous rage - has been brought forward to the 1960s film world and includes traces of the outcast characters and Western locales from Nathanael West's novel about Hollywood hangers-on, "The Day of the Locust."

Like Punchdrunk's acclaimed versions of "Faust" and "The Duchess of Malfi," the new show - one of the hottest tickets of the London summer - unfolds inside a gigantic empty space, in this case 18,600 square meters of a shuttered post office building beside the Paddington train station - enough room for 600 theatergoers to roam around. But "The Drowned Man" has innovations that earlier Punchdrunk productions lacked, chiefly in the complexity of the storytelling.

There are two plots, one set on a movie studio lot and the other in a desert town. There are two lead characters - Wendy, a studio starlet, and William, a young roughneck, who are each the stand-ins for Woyzeck. Audiences can dip into either plot, or both, over the course of three hours.

The result is a show that - for all the praise from critics - audience members after a recent performance called challenging to understand, especially given the scant use of dialogue.

"I completely lost my bearings at times and had no idea what I was watching, and there were split seconds when that felt like a nightmare," said Sam Hongsubchat, as she stood outside the redbrick home of "The Drowned Man." "Still, I loved it," she said. "I quite like just wandering around, spying on things. I quite like not having to think about everything."

Which pretty much sums up the unusual success of Punchdrunk: Its shows are at once dramatically opaque and commercially successful.

Whereas Broadway is dominated by musicals that are straightforwardly adapted from movies and books because producers believe that many audiences prefer tried-and-true stories, Punchdrunk has been selling tens of thousands of tickets to a show that many people don't comprehend.

The Punchdrunk auteurs, in a change from the usual you're-on-your-own style of their productions, decided to hand out slips of paper to audiences with a brief plot outline for both stories. An elevator operator also offers juicy tidbits about the characters.

Mr. Barrett had been eager to return to "Woyzeck" since his production at Exeter. But it took years for him and his co-director, Maxine Doyle, to hit on a concept that fits with the Punchdrunk mission of immersing audience members.

For the studio diva Dolores, for instance, the designers have created a dressing room replete with a dozen mirrors for her to gaze in and piles for presents from adoring fans.

"Every item is carefully designed, because we know people are going to pick it up and look at it," said Livi Vaughan, a designer. "And we're talking about thousands of items."

Neither Mr. Barrett nor Ms. Doyle would disclose the budget, but they said it was one of their most expensive shows yet, with more than 30 dancers and actors. But with a steady stream of income from "Sleep No More" in New York - again, they declined to provide numbers - Punchdrunk can afford to expand its ambitions, they said.

"The goal isn't to make money, but to create fascinating, challenging theater," Mr. Barrett said. "Fortunately, people keep coming to see it."

The New York Times

(China Daily 08/18/2013 page12)