"The written troubles of the brain": Sleep No More and the Space of Character

Abstract

Although it leaves the spoken text of Macbeth almost entirely behind, Punchdrunk Theatre's Sleep No More —first performed in London in 2003, mounted again in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2009, and currently running in New York City—undertakes a complex reflection on Shakespeare performance today, putting a reciprocal pressure on the critical history, situation, and practice of those terms of the art: "Shakespeare," "performance." Asserting an "immersive" epistemology, Sleep No More nonetheless evokes a surprisingly persistent, even New Critical conception of scripted language and performance. Inscribing literary character in performance space, both invoking and resisting the voyeuristic politics of modern fourth-wall performance, Sleep No More charts the pervasive legacy of largely literary conceptions of theatricality to the making of "new" performance, and—in its dynamic foregrounding of text, character, space, and audience—opens a series of questions about the apparent emancipation of the spectator, and about the character of "cognition," offered by theatrical "immersion."