Introducing The Burnt City and Beyond

British theatre company Punchdrunk are global leaders within the creative industries and are widely regarded as one of the founders of today’s immersive theatre phenomenon. Their 2022–23 production The Burnt City, an adaptation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Euripides’ Hecuba, was their first large-scale production in their hometown of London since The Drowned Man in 2013–14. This chapter introduces The Burnt City, which ran continuously in London from April 2022 to September 2023. Over 200,000 people attended the production’s 18-month run, making it the company’s largest and longest-running London production and a key cultural output of twenty-twenties British theatre. It contains an overview of Agamemnon and Hecuba, as well as of the overall structure of The Burnt City. It also introduces the contents of Punchdrunk on the Classics: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond, and my autoethnographic research methodology of Spectator-Participation-as-Research.