Hot pies, fluorescent lights, bustling commuters. You step, for Shunt’s latest production, from the commuter world of London Bridge station into a long, very dark, very spooky tunnel. As you progress – your feet feeling for solid ground – the buzz of a bar is heard in the distance, then you’re in amidst the smoke and the laughter. But this is only the ante-room.
Explore, and you’ll find your way into the production of Amato Saltone. Hand over the keyring you were given at the entrance and you’ll find yourself with a business card with your name for the evening. This lets you into the party proper.
Disconcerting, you’re in the depths of a penthouse – very effectively created – and a swinger’s party. Circulating waiters record your preferences for obscure sex acts – don’t recognise some of them, and you won’t – and they’ll fetch the dictionary stored in the piano stool. (A nice touch.) On and around the piano is a very pregnant cabaret singer (and she’s rather a classy cabaret singer, if heavy-handed on the flirting with the audience bit). Happily, however, the threat of audience participation is never taken too far.
Then the storm starts and the lights go out. Windows slide back, and we’re voyeurs, looking into two attic rooms where assignations are underway; not open, swingers’ party assignations, but furtive, secretive contacts. Then the male participants, in a weird variation of a post-copulation ritual, go out on the roof for a smoke. Then two men in pig masks kill the women. READ MORE
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