Shunt: The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face

Shunt - The Boy Who Climbed Out of His FaceSince moving out of the Arches at London Bridge to make way for the Shard, the performance collective Shunt have continued making large scale-works in different found spaces, often playing with immersing the audience into a series of environments. With The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face though, they have less taken over a found space and rather built their own on the Greenwich Peninsula. The Jetty, as this new venue is called, is perched on the edge of the south bank of the Thames, and it is this location that provides much of the context for this labyrinth-like show, creating a space that feels on the edge – of both society and time.

Built from an assortment of shipping containers welded together, this pop-up venue’s ramshackle furnishings jar against the looming presence of the adjoining Emirate Airline, the sleek cable cars that span the Thames. The view from the water’s edge embraces both the O2 Dome and the grubby industrial buildings on the north bank. Positioned in this no-man’s-land between hypermodern entertainment, industrial landscapes, and the timeless murky river, there is a sense that the world we inhabit is a liminal space, excluded from society, and left to fabricate our own world.

The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face is a brief experience, no more than 40 minutes. The audience is thrust into the darkness of the first container barefoot and clutching their shoes in a shoebox. Initially disorientating, what follows is a sequence of theatrical vignettes, as you progress from container to container. Each vignette is mediated by a solitary figure, all differently attired but clad in the same prosthetic mask. The blankness of this mask renders these figures bizarrely vacant, ciphers rather than characters, suggesting the anonymity of these inhabitants who have abandoned their individuality.

The Boy Who Climbed Out of His Face clearly suggests that the audience are refugee-like, wandering from dingy back-room club to desolate landscape and to interrogation room. This resonance is made more acute given the recent discovery of 35 Sikh refugees in a shipping container at Tilbury Docks. By placing the audience in this position there is a clear attempt to open up our proximity to these experiences. To get us to recognise that we are literally only a few steps removed from the unseen world of those who are trying to find safety by braving illicit journeys across seas and national borders.

There are moments of surprise, and bold performances from the performers you meet on the journey. The brevity of the work is both a strength and an issue – the rapidity with which the audience are moved through the spaces begins to foster an unsettling sense of the uncertainty of these journeys. However, the individual environments themselves don’t quite reach enough intensity to capitalise on our kinaesthetic experience of this immersion.

The final vignette though, with the audience stood atop the containers enjoying a panoramic view of the Thames and listening to the haunting strains of guitar and voice, provides a kinaesthetic sensation of the liminal. It is here, in this moment, that it is clearest that in our daily lives we do not notice the real world.

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About Thomas JM Wilson

Thomas JM Wilson has been writing for Total Theatre since 2001. His own performance work lies at the borders of dance and theatre, with a particular interest in solo performance. He is an Associate Artist of Gandini Juggling, working as Archivist and Publications Author. He also currently teaches on Rose Bruford's BA European Theatre Arts, and is a co-editor of the Training Grounds section of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.