Punchdrunk & the National Theatre Team Up for The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable

Britain's Punchdrunk theater company and the National Theatre will present a production of The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable. Punchdrunk's biggest production to date, The Drowned Man will begin performances on June 20 at a secret, yet to be announced location in London's Zone 1 area. The production opens July 4 and will play a limited engagement through September 29.

Inspired by German playwright Georg Buchner's Woyzeck, The Drowned Man is set in a seedy Hollywood underworld where the studio system meets a forgotten land filled with dreamers who exist at the fringes of the movie industry. Celluloid fantasy clings to desperate realism and dissolves into a hallucinatory world. This theatrical journey follows its protagonists along the precipice between illusion and reality.

"We’ve wanted to do Woyzeck in London for many years and have finally found a building that lives up to the extraordinary atmosphere of Buchner's masterpiece," said Felix Barrett, Punchdrunk's artistic director, in a statement.

Punchdrunk return to London following The Masque of the Red Death and their still-running off-Broadway hit Sleep No More, which transformed a warehouse space in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood into an interactive theater space called the McKittrick Hotel to tell Shakespeare's classic Macbeth with a Hitchcock twist. Punchdrunk's other productions include Faust, Tunnel 228, It Felt Like A Kiss, The Duchess of Malfi and The Crash of the Elysium.

The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable will be co-directed by Barret and Maxine Doyle, designed by Barrett, Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns, choreographed by Maxine Doyle and feature sound design by Stephen Dobbie and lighting design by Mike Gunning.