Shunt are innovators whose ambitious work has long worried at the definitions of audience, venue and performance, creating perfectly perplexing theatre experiences whose power to unsettle and surprise through sheer theatricality have far outstripped the company’s many aesthetic imitators. The long running and late-lamented enterprise of Shunt Vaults (lost to the murky foundations of the Shard) created a diverse ecosystem for a whole family of new performance as well as rich site-specific possibilities in its glorious rat-infested corners.
The creation of a labyrinth in the company’s new production The Architects seems a fitting tribute to this lost space. This is not the only way in which The Architects feels like it expresses many of the company’s core obsessions: the pleasures and intrigues of a contained environment, establishing for the audience an identity and sense of security that the company revel in undermining. A cast of perfectly observed grotesques barely keeping some destructive half-glimpsed force at bay…
Shunt approach the Minotaur myth from an oblique angle – we are in the present day and we’re embarking on a decadent cruise – and it says a lot about the resonance of the source material and their sense of its heart that it is nevertheless profoundly identifiable. Their emphasis is the intrigue of the tale’s dark sexuality, from which they have created a company of grotesques to relish. Always reassuringly separated from us by one type of screen or another, the threat that they exude grows ominously, culminating in a genuinely unnerving closing sequence (and a breathtaking aerial turn I‘ve never seen done elsewhere).
The architects themselves, in charge of the boat, are brilliant comic characters: all Scandinavian earnestness and inappropriate upward inflections. A live band animates the performance, giving depth to the world of the cruise, though I wished the bar had stayed open during the show so we could really be given the chance to live in the fiction of the space. The company have fun exploring episodic storytelling that makes judicious use of black outs to give scale to their material: by the time the boat scenario breaks down, we genuinely feel we may have been months at sea. And there is great scope here to demonstrate their gift for working an audience, for bringing us together and unpicking our expectations.
This is in many ways a show of binaries: cool Scandinavian order vs. lurking bestiality; the on-land masterminds and the architects on deck; the orderly(ish) frame of the ship ultimately undermined by the far less manageable reality within. For me, The Architects works as a really evocative container for the company’s unique vision. It’s the architecture of this myth that really takes this production to another level: the shared references it supports allow us to appreciate with much greater clarity the company’s craft in translating an ancient myth into a piece of work packed with questions of resonance – about hedonism, about society and about art. One note of caution – this is site-specific performance in a genuinely untamed site and it’s the middle of winter, so be sensible and wear a big coat!