The new play Shunt Money from the folks at Shunt - taking place in a huge tobacco warehouse (apparently once owned by Fidel Castro) down the road from their normal premises in the cavernous, catacomb-like railway arches underneath London Bridge station – is certainly visually spectacular in a way that can rival even interactive performance collective Punchdrunk’s mindblowing theatre productions (which GoodnightLondon has covered elsewhere on this blog).
Without wanting to give too much away, let’s just say that inside the panopticon-like warehouse, you feel like you are on the set of Brazil or an updated version of 1984, with dry ice in the darkness and ludicrously dressed riot police (unsurprisingly played by actors/volunteers rather than real police – or at least I’m assuming so) guarding a bronze, huge three-storey Victorian-looking metallic engine structure, replete with steam pulleys, pistons, levers, engines, and dials, resembling something that you might find in an underwater submarine in World War II, or from the set of Metropolis. Towering in the centre of the warehouse and belching out smoke like some being that’s alive, it’s certainly a site to behold, and is even more spectacular when you are trapped in it’s belly inside, with it’s transparent flooring revealing chambers, rooms and saunas below and above, while a bald figure all in white resembling Caliban in Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books descends from ceilings, scurries spider-like through the rooms below and around the opaque roof, and does somersaults around the audience at intervals. Who is the voyeur, the audience or the actors? It’s difficult to tell who is really spying on who, just as the seamless visuals can’t quite hide the handling of the story, which bases itself around Émile Zola’s L’Argent – a novel in the late 1800s prophetically inspired by the collapse of the French bank Union Generale, who went under as a consequence of dire financial management, greed, speculation and over-investment. The relevance is obvious when placed within the context of the current financial crisis (particularly the collapse of Lehman Brothers) and the mismanagement that has took place on Wall Street and the Square Mile, yet the dialogue was so cryptic and obfuscated and the script so impenetrable that it became difficult to really know what was going on half of the time when observing the interaction of the characters as they span their baseless pyramid schemes to each other. Perhaps this impenetrability was deliberate, intended to approximate or signify the Byzantine nature of the doomed dealings and wheelings – grounded, as it turned out, on nothing - that was being depicted, just as we now know that much of the financial dealings of business moguls in the real world was based on an illusion.
Regardless, Punchdrunk’s performance of Faust as a contrast somehow made complete sense even if you weren’t following the story closely, simply because the set design and themes explored in each room captured the story so perfectly and expertly. Still, like watching cities being engulfed by tidal waves and storms in The Day After Tomorrow while ignoring the schmaltzy Hollywood character plotting, the visuals alone made it worthwhile. After attending this and the Punchdrunk performances of Faust and The Masque of the Red Death, it seems obvious where the next location for an interactive theatre performance of this kind should be: Battersea Power Station, a venue that would truly make for an incredible backdrop (which is did, tantalisingly, in Children of Men, and which has at least hosted a couple of exhibitions). Yet, with depressing inevitability, the status of that stunning monument, just as with the handling of the banking system by those responsible that led to the current financial meltdown, remains mired in staggering mismanagement and negligence. Even if Shunt Money’s script was flawed at times, its central message has never been at a more prescient time.


Shunt Money image: © Shunt Money website/Christopher Sims.
Battersea Power Station photo: © Saatchi Gallery website/2006 Parkview International

A masked ball of the most unusual magnificence...

After Faust last year, which took place in a warehouse in Wapping, the recent immersive theatre performance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death at Battersea Arts Centre, which has just finished it’s run, is another amazing Punchdrunk production. Just as with their treatment of Faust’s multi-linear storyline, the site-specific play is certainly breathtaking to behold in visual terms: some sixty rooms take you through the story of Prince Prospero’s fight in his abbey against the advancing plague of the Red Death, wherein the protagonist eventually falls dead at the feet of the disease, personified in human form by a mysterious guest shrouded in black during the masquerade ball. With the winter chill outside at that time, it seemed a perfect time to experience Allen Poe’s allegory supposedly about the inescapability of death.
The opulent surroundings of Battersea Arts Centre, with its grandiose chapel designs and balconies, certainly fit the gothic mis-en-scene. As with Faust, the mask wearing was compulsory, as you flitted between actors reciting lines and simply exploring the huge, cavernous maze of differently coloured rooms inside the BAC. On some four floors or so, the vast space took in different floors and rooms, including a huge bar on the top floor with cabaret, a live band, and belly dancing. Meanwhile, the main auditorium was done up brilliantly like a castle at the edge of a dark forest, bathed in blue light, with the actors wandering around you. It’s the attention to detail that’s so amazing: rooms done up intricately with nineteenth-century pianos, furniture, clocks, and pages of Poe’s writings stuck on the floor and walls; gangway corridors through white sheets; bedrooms with four-poster beds…Perhaps inevitably, the result of this overwhelming experience is that the visitor loses their way in following the story in a normal, linear manner; but the point is that Punchdrunk performances are designed as an immersive embracing of both location and story. During Faust I only half followed the story, being so enthralled with the different rooms and huge auditoriums in the Wapping warehouse; a similar principle operated at the BAC. The finale - where you ran through an incredible huge church-like area with high domes and ceilings from some bygone age – remained out of this world, topped off the ball and red confetti - the colour of blood. Beforehand, while walking the streets of east and south London in the winter dark, the title track from Burial’s Untrue played in my headphones. It’s disembodied voices and eerie industrial noises, where everything sounds submerged and muffled, fitted the scenery of late-night London perfectly, with its barely-lit alleys, Victorian houses and ghosts of centuries past - of the great plague, Shelley and Jack the Ripper. The creaking, deserted overtones and alienated voices that emerge in Burial’s music wouldn’t have been out of place as the soundtrack for the performance, in fact, with The Masque’s gothic, candlelit vibe and feeling of impending doom. There’s even a weird parallel wherein parts of Untrue remind me of the more subdued, bleak industrial noise soundscapes that Godspeed You! Black Emperor came out with on their first two albums, in-between the crashing guitar riffs and violins. Listen to the first album and the last five minutes of CD1 of Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven and you’ll see what I mean.

I’ve been lucky enough to witness some amazing crossroads between art, music and performance recently in London.
The interactive performance of Faust at a warehouse in Wapping has to be one of the most extraordinary experiences that I’ve had recently. This re-enactment of the classic story of man's pact with the devil took place on four floors of a warehouse, wherein you adorned a mask on entering and were took into a lift. The lift operator then chucked out people on different floors one by one, after which you were left to explore the different floors, each themed after the play. 210 different rooms were styled after the play, including one styled as a laboratory with an actor as Faust the alchemist muttering to himself and wondering around with pots, vials of liquid, and papyrus everywhere; another with a 50’s themed American diner; another involving bedrooms and parlours; another one with leaves at your feet and bamboo hut walls; and a plush cinema. Meanwhile, maskless actors flitted about between the rooms acting out the roles, so that at times you would literally be standing right next to them as they recited the lines and acted out the parts of the play. Whoever set up the design and layout of the different rooms did so pretty meticulously, with a million things to explore. A pretty amazing experience all round, which included a floor with fauna and another with dark, winding, endless book cases, where you were literally walking around on your own in darkness.





The other two exhibitions that have came close recently are this one off Brick Lane, in which household appliances, used washing machines and general home appliance detritus took central stage in a huge factory. Walking around it felt like something from Tetsuo: The Iron Body Man, particularly when you could go inside a defunct freezer, which led down to a tunnel.





Finally, the performance of Ray Lee’s Sound Bites at Shunt, the huge, cavernous rail arches next to London Bridge station, in which revolving red lights mounted on plinths circled around at different speed. Walking around these plinths in darkness, all you could see was the lights, set to a swirl of freeform, ambient music, oscilltaing at speed like mini planets orbiting the Sun, with everything else blottled out. It’s now on Kinetica galleries too. Pretty amazing stuff.
Next up is Gilbert & George at the Tate Modern.