Last night, V and VMAN ventured out into a wet, winter-dying night and entered a dark labyrinth of hedonism, bloodlust, taxidermy, and synesthesia—a six-story, 100-room, lascivious, Lynchian production of Macbeth known as Sleep No More. If you’re looking for the deets, head on over to Vmagazine.com, because over here, in the spirit of the production, we’re going for more kaleidoscopic avant-descriptors, less facts and more word fuckery.
 
Sleep No More is like being inside a gothic Joseph Cornell box built inside Stanley Kubrick’s adrenal gland, but with more orgies. It’s like an Alfred Kubin drawing come to zygote life, bedside-read an Edward Gorey story, then grown up and got into shrooms and huffing and Hitchcock and steampunk and masturbatory cutting. A Minotaur performs a sloppy, strobe-lighted C-section to a soundtrack something like Thomas Bangalter’s score for Irreversible, with the lighting of Irreversible, with the heat and sweat and intensity of Irreversible, but much more blood than Irreversible. Bathtubs won’t wash away hands stained by human innards. Apothecaries and detective agencies and infanticide and candy shops and dead things made gorgeous. This is what’s inside the Black Lodge. It’s a haunting and harrowing spectacle, a phenomenal achievement and breathtaking performance, and it’s exactly where I would have wanted to live that year in College when I was really into opium and drone music. Go there immediately. Lose yourself. Find yourself.

Photography Alick Crossley

KEYWORDS: Sleep No More