Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City is a stunning immersion in the fall of Troy

The Burnt City

One cartridge place, london

You can sit down in Troy. Not so in Greece. It’s a tiny detail, but a significant one in Punchdrunk’s spectacular The Burnt City. The company’s new wraparound epic, directed by Felix Barrett and Maxine Doyle, fills two huge buildings in south-east London with scenes inspired by Greek mythology, specifically the fall of Troy. In both, you can lose yourself (quite literally) in the story. In both, the devastation of war hangs like smoke in the air. But Troy has a bubbling humanity to it that is entirely absent in the vast, desolate grandeur of Mycenae, Greece. Victory, here, feels empty and echoing.

It is, like so much of Punchdrunk’s work, dreamlike and disorienting, baffling your senses as you push through drapes or shuffle down dimly-lit corridors. It starts, quite mischievously, by sending you through an archaeological exhibition about Troy. Then suddenly you are traversing a twilight zone, where silent phones and yellowing papers sit on abandoned desks, to arrive in an afterlife where the events of that conflict play out. The period is uncertain: billowing robes mix with art deco. Have we slipped into the Underworld?

The design (Livi Vaughan and Beatrice Minns), lighting (FragmentNine and Ben Donoghue) and Stephen Dobbie’s rolling, rumbling soundscape sculpt the space and mood. There’s a blue chill and sepulchral stateliness to Greece, where the massive open arena is dominated by two tank-traps and a long curving staircase to the upper hall — the palace of Agamemnon (Robert McNeill) and Clytemnestra (Emily Terndrup).

A huge stone plinth stretches the length of the gallery, connecting the only human-sized, domestic fixtures in the space: the elegant shower where Agamemnon meets his end and the cluttered, girlish bedroom where Iphigenia (Stefanie Noll) dresses herself, excitedly, for a wedding — only to be sacrificed by her father for a fair wind to Troy. That story and its aftermath play out over and over — delivered through Doyle’s sinuous and stunningly performed choreography — as if haunting the place.

Across a border checkpoint, you arrive in Troy, a city marked by a sense of life arrested. Shops, bars, hotels and warrens of alleyways cluster around a market square dotted with abandoned stalls. Here you can watch as Hecuba (Sarah Dowling) faces Agamemnon’s troops. But this is a place bustling with stories, divine and mortal. It’s hotter, busier, throbbing with music and full of detail and incident. Neon signs advertise nightclubs. In an empty restaurant, a sad-eyed waitress wipes down tables.

Even the crowds behave differently in the two cities: in Mycenae they hover in the vast space in large groups; in Troy they split up, pursue individual characters and poke around bedrooms. You could spend all evening hunkered down in one room, marvelling at the intricate detail of the set: the abandoned spectacles, the half-read book, the hairbrushes, plant pots, cooking utensils and lampshades adorned with the Homeric Hymns. At one point, I found myself alone in Hades’s quiet, heavily furnished office, where I sat in his imposing chair and snooped in his drawers (full of official papers in incomprehensible script).

The more you know about Greek mythology, the more nuggets you will find. But narrative clarity isn’t really the point: uncertainty is part of the package and it’s impossible to see everything. That opacity can be profoundly irritating for some. But let go and roll with it and you become an explorer yourself, piecing together fragments, turning over objects, glimpsing snippets of lives. And at the core is a moving story of two bereaved mothers living and reliving the loss that has destroyed them.

★★★★☆

Booking to December 4, onecartridgeplace.com

The Corn Is Green

National Theatre, London

We are back with memory in Dominic Cooke’s ingenious revival of Emlyn Williams’s 1938 play, The Corn Is Green. Inspired by his own experience, Williams’s drama tells the story of Lily Moffat, a galvanising teacher who arrives in a Welsh mining village around the turn of the 20th century, with a mission to educate the local children. Discovering a protégé in young Morgan Evans, she is determined to get him to Oxford. She drills him in history, grammar, Greek, but fails to notice how this distances him from his community — or how biology works on teenage boys.

Led by a superb performance from Nicola Walker and punctuated by song from a miners’ choir, this could be an uplifting but sentimental tale. But Cooke’s inspired approach is to include Williams (Gareth David-Lloyd) in the action. We meet him at a fashionable party, from which he breaks away to reflect on his past. Haunted by snatches of melody from the miners, he starts to write, conjuring the play up before us on an empty stage.

This framework reminds us that this fairytale story is in fact rooted in reality and offsets some of the creakier elements of the script. Most significantly, it pays homage to the power of imagination. Williams coaxes us to go with him as he recreates events and, in Ultz’s design, the set becomes more realistic and detailed. Imagination is key in this story: it drives Lily Moffat’s vision, Morgan’s response and the ingenuity of Bessie Watty (Saffron Coomber), a pretty, working-class girl who finds her own solution to society’s limitations. This is a play about art, education and defying a society rigged against you.

Walker is tremendous as the schoolteacher: very funny, sharp as tacks, electrifying in her energy and enthusiasm. But she’s also obstinate, brusque to the point of bruising and blithely insensitive to those who don’t interest her. Her own education, as much as Morgan’s, is central to the story. Iwan Davies, as Morgan, matches her with pride and passion. The fine cast lend affection and humour to some rather flimsy characters, while the miners’ choir watches on solicitously.

★★★★☆

To June 11, nationaltheatre.org.uk

Marys Seacole

Donmar warehouse, london

Another strong woman faces down systemic prejudice in Jackie Sibblies Drury’s Marys Seacole. But while the play opens, as we might expect, with the pioneering Scottish-Jamaican nurse in Victorian dress, telling us about her life, it soon shifts focus. Sibblies Drury wrote the scintillating Fairview and this play demonstrates the same blistering originality. It becomes not just a testament to Seacole but to all those black women who work in healthcare today and who still suffer racist abuse and exploitation. And, as it wheels about in time and location, Sibblies Drury asks penetrating questions about class, race and power, about who cares for whom — and why.

Tom Scutt’s design bisects the stage with a huge green medical curtain which rises and falls to slip between Jamaica, Crimea and modern hospital wards. One minute we are with Mary and her colleague (Kayla Meikle and Déja J Bowens, both excellent) as they tend to an elderly white woman who has soiled herself; the next we’re in the Crimean War where the same duo care for wounded soldiers, while Florence Nightingale (Olivia Williams) issues imperious put-downs. Overlapping period and place, the play reveals repeating patterns and endemic inequalities.

It’s tartly funny and tough — Mary’s mother delivering a formidable speech on white privilege — but equally tender, and Nadia Latif’s production shifts deftly between registers. A restless, intelligent, passionate play about mothers, daughters and the true cost of care.

★★★★☆

To June 4, donmarwarehouse.com