Trying to find a place for me to jot down my thoughts after we experienced Viola’s Room in New York. My sister and her partner got us tickets initially to Life And Trust (also by Punchdrunk), but that theatrical experience shut down. So they pivoted and got us tickets to Viola’s Room, which was very interesting! We all loved Sleep No More from Punchdrunk when we experienced it 2 years ago, so this was a very thoughtful gift! A note of warning though: Sleep No More and Viola’s Room are very different immersive experiences. Viola’s Room is a linear, guided adventure, whereas Sleep No More was a freeform theatrical experience. Now let’s get to focusing on Viola’s Room! Last warning: full spoilers ahead.

Viola’s room does not have actors. There are no jumpscares despite the darkness. For some reason, despite that being stated, I kept having moments throughout the experience where I was convinced something would jump at me from the dark. There truly aren’t any jumpscares though! They make use of almost all your sensory experiences including: smell, sight, hearing, and touch. You’re not allowed to talk during the audio-based journey. You will have to take off your shoes and socks at the start, where they’ll have bottles of sanitizer for everyone’s feet.

You put on a headset and your party will then “follow the light” to proceed to different locations in the various rooms and scenes that tells the story ahead of you. Your headset will play music, as well as the narrator’s voice (Helena Bonham Carter!!) that sets the tone and explanations for what you’re seeing. In regards to “seeing”, there are many times where our group was plunged in darkness so you’re slightly left up to your imagination until a dim lightbulb turns on somewhere and your group hurries towards it and sees various scenes make itself apparent.

You’re first introduced to a hallway of a house where we enter Viola’s bedroom. Everyone is asked to pick a spot to lie down and there are several comfortable mattresses and nooks around the room for this. We all laid down in our separate areas and music started coming through our headphones. And for the next 50 ish minutes, we were taken through two stories: one set in the modern world (the bedroom we’re introduced to), and one of fantasy and dreams (where we’d have to crawl through a tunnel from the bedroom to get to).

I don’t trust myself to recollect every single scene and dialogue we were shown, but it was interesting that all of us had a slightly different read on what the overall story was. Below is my take.

Viola is a girl with a sad and troubled past. Her parents are mentioned to be gone, but I think it could be that they’ve actually died or they might’ve gone through a divorce. But whatever traumatic event occurred, we see her turning to childhood fairytales that her mother used to tell her. She escapes into those stories, and the story we experience as we jump back and forth between the “real world” and the fairytale one is “The Moon Slave“.

The Wiki page gives you access to the whole story, but essentially, we’re told about a beautiful princess who was betrothed to a prince. She loved to dance. She wasn’t in love with her prince per se, but was willing to get married out of obedience and duty. The prince, however, did love her.

The princess finds herself wandering to an abandoned maze. The maze called to her and she entered it in hopes to reach its center. She manages to get to it, and is rewarded with a sense of satisfaction and fulfillment. She dances to the moon in a frenetic and almost possessed manner, but eventually she goes back to palace. The prince is confused with her disappearance, but she is standoffish in her reply as she wants to keep her experience to herself.

In between, we’re once again brought back to the “real life” in Viola’s room. We see that she’s been crossing off and isolating pieces of text that hints at something ominous and dark. It seems to reference Pan, god of the wild, shepherds, flocks, and rustic music. It seems Viola’s a bit lost in life and trying to find an escape or outlet within the room she’s grown up in. We then move on once again back to the fairytale.

The princess finds that every month during the full moon, she has an intense longing to go back to the maze. She ended up going back multiple times, giving in to the moon’s summons. At one point, she goes to a church to pray (and you’ll get to live through this. There’s a beautiful stained glass window with the sun shining through it where you’ll get to take a moment to sit down and observe), but she once again gets called to dance through the maze. At one point in the maze, you literally feel the walls starting to shrink and get more and more narrow. It gets a tad claustrophobic (which is what they warn you about with the one-pager at the start of the experience) as you bump your way through the dark and tight maze walls. The princess is described to have kept dancing, until she realized she was no longer dancing alone. During the experience, this part freaked me out as we were in pitch darkness, and wind could be felt around our feet. And then lights come on and we’re greeted with a view of an enormous tree with endless pairs of worn ballet slippers hanging from them.

The fairytale seems to end with the princess going missing. It’s hinted that she might have ran away with an entity with a cloven foot. And then we’re brought back to the “real world” of Viola’s Room where we’re met with packing boxes. Reading the boxes, you can see it’s as if someone’s packing to go off to university or college, or they could simply be moving out to another place.

I read this as Viola finally being able to move on from her traumatic past. She’s choosing to leave her childhood home, where while she had some lovely memories with her mother telling her stories, but she’s also had a sense of fear and trauma from whatever happened. Just like the sense of fear and darkness we’re introduced to as we go through the maze again and again as the princess in the fairytale. Because we’re led down a lit hallway at the end, I like to believe that she’s found her way and will no longer be burdened with the heavy history in her old home.

There are recurring symbolism and imagery throughout Viola’s Room, but I think that with only one walkthrough, I did not grasp enough of these details to properly digest what they might have meant. It’s interesting reading the internet theories on what other folks think the story was about, and some are pretty wild. I’m going to walk away with my above understanding for now though! It’s satisfying enough for me. We joked at one point: “What if the creators kind of just did it randomly without any rhyme or reason, and we’re all stuck contemplating how the two stories are supposed to intertwine?”