Theatre Review: Tropicana - SHUNT Vaults, London - Friday 14 January 2005

Writer: Marcos Moret
Photograph: Tristram Kenton

The bustle of London Bridge underground station appears from the gloom of history-laden Shad Thames like a well-tended fish tank sat glowing at the back of a coal cellar. Within, we join a queue of people waiting to pass through a small door, biding their time with happy Friday night chatter. A few curious passers by ask us as to the purpose of the line, to which I respond “erm, it’s a kind of theatre thing”, and leave it that. Truth be told, I’m really not exactly sure what to expect.

Inside to a small room resembling an administrative room that one assumes must be just like those peppering the entire underground system. A small antechamber contains an actor doing a commendable impression if a bona fide London Underground employee. He puzzles over a jigsaw (puppies) for several minutes before flippantly advising us to make a Narnia-style exit through the door of a nearby filing cabinet. Having done so, we find ourselves in a plush photo-lined waiting room of sorts, and then we’re ushered into one of those massive twenty-person elevators used in London’s deep-level stations, where a lift conductor takes a photo of us all as he’s “never had so many people in my lift before”.

And then into darkness. I make out arches, and lots of them – dusty, musty, cobwebbed, damp. A little way off, a thick beam of yellow-white light penetrates forth from above, punching a misty cone through the pressing dark. Two more shafts of light further down the passage provide perspective in what would otherwise be a space of indeterminable dimensions. And then into each shaft skitters a nymph in Carnival garb, each contorting to the groans and bass shudders enveloping the space, before merging once again with the blackness.

This is Tropicana, the creation of the ten-person SHUNT collective and brought about in collaboration with the National Theatre. The latest in a string of site-specific ‘experiences’ that eschew audience passivity in favour of a more inclusive approach, it also marks the first show of what will be a three-year stint at the Vaults. About the experience: I’d tell you more but for fear of spoiling the fun for those of you who end up going, I won’t. It is in turn visceral and macabre, absurd and hilarious, disorienting and transfixing; Dada meets Kafka meets Dali meets the Chapman Brothers. It ain’t nothing like you’ve seen before, and let’s just say that once you get a glimpse of what goes on behind locked doors, traveling the Tube won’t seem quite the same again. Mind the gap.

Note: Tropicana has been extended until 25 June 2005. For more information and tickets see www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.