TWO windows light up. Two men climb out in their underpants, edge across a roof, smoke fags together, then peer through binoculars into the night. Meanwhile, their two women start talking on the phone, only to be suffocated by two figures wearing pig-masks who have crept up on them carrying plastic bags.
Welcome to the city as it has been imagined by Shunt in its capsule tribute to the work of Cornell Woolrich, author of the tales that inspired Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black.
In its publicity bumf, the company talks of the changes in London since 7/7: “seeming more fragile, its vulnerability a little more exposed, its citizens more suspicious, anxious, less anonymous”. I’m not sure that Shunt fulfils its twin aims of dramatising this zeitgeist and bringing to impressionistic life an era it sees as characterised by a sort of inquisitive paranoia; but it has chosen a good setting for its creepy creativity.
You enter Shunt Vaults rather the way magicians in Harry Potter enter platform 9¾ at King’s Cross, through a gap in the wall that leads into the catacombs below London Bridge station. You walk down a long, musty corridor of brickwork flanked by arches more sepulchral than any imagined by Flanagan and Allen. What did the Victorians put here? Bits of train? Crates of claret? Corpses? At the end, though, is a dimly lit bar — and the drab room in which the roof-and-window episode occurs.
Before this I was given two keys, one to a locker containing a funny hat, the other to a tag telling me that my name for the evening was Harry Beck. Since the ladies’ and gents’ keys were then mingled, it looked as if Shunt would throw a wife-swapping party. But no. This was just a pointless distraction before we went in groups on an hour-long tour.
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In a tacky kitchen, with a fridge containing only boots, we took a phone call saying there had been a terrible accident and watched a man in jeans menacingly brandishing a fireman’s axe. Then we were moved into a cinema-like room from which we saw another group go through the identical experience. Then we were introduced to the “dangerous criminal” Bing Hubris and other supposedly dodgy characters. Then off to observe a pregnant woman climb out of plastic sheeting and — oh, much else.
What did these often surreal, sometimes striking snapshots mean? That the city is full of wary watchers interpreting and misinterpreting odd, disturbing evidence, I suppose — and maybe that’s London 2006.
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