Punchdrunk's Felix Barratt on the immersive pioneer's greatest hits: 'Always change the rules as you go'

Felix Barratt is the artistic director of Punchdrunk, the pioneering theatre company that really sent immersive theatre mainstream with a series of acclaimed shows over more than two decades. Here he talks about the company’s key shows...

Masque of the Red Death

Battersea Arts Centre (2007)

We had done a couple of big shows in huge derelict spaces. Faust had been in an old sorting office in Wapping and we gratefully had the backing of the National. I think Tom Morris introduced us to his old stomping ground at the Battersea Arts Centre, and said the next radical thing to do, rather than taking over a disused space would be to reinvent a working space.

So we had the different challenge of making a place that was familiar to a lot of audiences completely unfamiliar, to fill it with ghosts rather than activate it with the ghosts of the past.

It was an incredible space. David Jubb, then artistic director of the BAC, gave us carte blanche to reimagine the space and open up bits backstage, old cupboards that weren’t being used. We were able