Nicescare's Blog

Felix Barrett is a theatrical enchanter. He can turn a disused Docklands warehouse into the hottest venue in town; he can make audiences unrecognisable to themselves (with ghoul masks). He can turn the classics – Macbeth, Faust, The Masque of the Red Death – into terrifying, magical worlds you can explore; he lets you come face-to-face with Friar Lawrence, humming as he mixes up Juliet’s medicine, or sets the Spanish Inquisition on you in the dark. He can even turn your white wine red (easy – at his 2005 production of The Firebird Ball he employed a magician behind the interval bar). His company, Punchdrunk, is cultishly popular; it never advertises, but tickets for all 13 performances of The Duchess of Malfi, at a warehouse in Gallions Reach, went in six hours. Sleep No More,cheap classic dresses, Macbeth reimagined as a Hitchcock noir, is currently taking New York by storm, its run extended from six weeks to six months; audiences have included Natalie Portman, David Byrne, Matt Damon, the Olsen twins, Spike Lee, and Justin Timberlake. Having long been the darling of the arts establishment (the English National Opera collaborated with him last year on The Duchess of Malfi) he is now courted by brands such as Louis Vuitton and PlayStation who have commissioned one-off Punchdrunk productions. Barrett seems proud and amused by his success, but fundamentally unbothered. ‘I’m just pleased people are enjoying the shows, whoever they are.’

When I meet him he is hard at work in his London office, an old converted Undergound carriage,homecoming dresses 2011, curtained inside like a gypsy caravan, and perched on top of a Shoreditch warehouse. We sit outside in the sunshine on Platform Six. A south-east Londoner born and bred, with a soft voice, Barrett, 33, is a methodical kind of dreamer. Hunting for disused buildings in which to stage performances, he used to walk the streets of London himself, ‘ticking them off in the A-Z’ but he now employs a team of two ‘urban explorers’. ‘They’ve had a great summer. I wish I could have joined them.’ For Barrett,black bridesmaid dresses, everything hinges on the performance space; he pursues rotten buildings the way conventional casting directors pursue stars. Loath to share his prized demolition-ready wrecks, he reluctantly tells me that yesterday he looked around an abandoned hospital,black flower girl dresses, which had water dripping through its ceiling. ‘I can’t say any more. We find the building before we decide on the story we’re telling. Architecture and atmosphere are powerful forces. The building tells us what to do.’

“I find it totally bizarre and depressing that people will do what you tell them as long as you’re wearing high-vis. Like CCTV, it sums up how compliant we’ve become.”

Nonetheless, the UK’s attachment to the fabric is mild compared to that of France and Italy, where motorists are compelled to carry high-visibility clothing in their vehicles in case of a breakdown. In France, cyclists are compelled to wear such attire at night.

It may not be fashionable, but safety campaigners say bright clothing is a life-saver It was invented by an American, Bob Switzer, whose ambitions of becoming a doctor ended when he was injured in an industrial accident during the 1930s. While recuperating, he developed a fluorescent paint before fashioning the first item of high-visibility clothing from his wife’s wedding dress.

High-vis first came to the UK in 1964 when it was trialled by railway maintenance workers in Glasgow. The 1974 Health and Safety At Work Act and 1992′s Personal Protective Equipment At Work regulations – both of which required bosses to guard against potential industrial hazards – ensured its proliferation.

It was not only in the workplace that high-vis took off. An influential 1981 US study found that two-thirds of crashes between motorcycles and cars took place when the car driver failed to see the approaching bike, and safety campaigners have long urged pedestrians, cyclists and all other road users to don clothing that is as bright as possible.

No-one, however, has ever argued that the look is chic. In 2008, the designer Karl Lagerfeld appeared in a French public information campaign attired in a fluorescent waistcoat above the slogan: “It’s yellow, it’s ugly, it doesn’t go with anything, but it could save your life”.

The ‘majority’ of the budget goes on making the space sound: ‘We spend a lot getting rid of asbestos.’ Punchdrunk often ends up transforming a local eyesore or reclaiming an unloved void for the community; no wonder former culture secretary James Purnell acclaimed the company as an example of ‘access and excellence’. ‘We put on Faust in a former factory in Wapping which had been squatted and had a very bad atmosphere. The heart of the building was really corrupt, and places like that can be a drain on the energy of people nearby.’ In collaboration with the National Theatre they lavished care and imagination on every corner of the building,wedding dresses, creating a forest of electrical cables, a graveyard, a David Lynchean Wild West saloon bar and an alchemist’s lair in the eaves. The real ghosts were banished, the show received five star plaudits, and won a Critics’ Circle award for best designer, and the site has now been developed into flats. In New York, Sleep No More is being performed in what was a trendy club called Bed, until a gruesome fatality saw it shut down. ‘There was a fight on the top floor and somehow the lift doors opened and someone was punched backwards into the lift shaft and died. Next day the building was boarded up and four years later we were the first people to go back in.’ Now the Macbeths can be glimpsed there, dancing to ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’. Barrett’s fascination with place started as a child when he explored the majestic UCL library in Senate House, where his father was a librarian. ‘It was hugely formative, just a magical place, with beautifully antiquated architecture. I have so much reverence for books – a Kindle is the work of the devil.’ To him, the labyrinthine stacks below ground were off-limits, which only made them more compelling. ‘I was so inspired by Deborah Warner’s Angel Project [a 1999 site-specific performance about angels brooding over London on the top floor of the Euston Tower].’