“Follow the light.” This is the mantra of Viola’s Room (2024), an unsettling and startlingly beautiful new show from the legendary Punchdrunk. Based on Barry Pain’s little-known Gothic fairytale “The Moon-Slave” from Stories in the Dark (1901), as reworked by Booker prize-shortlisted writer Daisy Johnson, the show is narrated with warmth and chilling menace by the fabulous Helena Bonham-Carter.

Punchdrunk’s last offering, The Burnt City (2022), suffered from an overabundance of spectacle at the expense of narrative. It was awe-inspiring, but at an inhuman scale. Viola’s Room, by contrast, is personal, even intimate. Barefoot, we are invited to traverse a dream-maze of shadows and light. Small groups of audience members lie on the beds; feel the sand between their toes; flail their way through a maze of sheets. There are no actors – only Bonham-Carter’s voice in our heads, and a symphony of set, lighting and sound design which together create a masterpiece of storytelling.

There is a special kind of immersion which comes when we wear headphones. We’ve all felt it, striding down an escalator or staring out of a train window: that sense of being the only person in the world. The directness of this connection to the story, coupled with the marvellously tactile world that Punchdrunk have created, brings immersive theatre to a whole new level of, well, immersion.

Bewitching, intriguing, and sometimes genuinely frightening, Viola’s Room carries its audience into a world of menace and wonder. Somehow, by leaving out the live actors altogether, Punchdrunk has rediscovered its humanity.

Playing at Punchdrunk’s home in London, 14 May – 18 August 2024.