reviewsdancebeartimeout1

You don’t expect to go to Bethnal Green to witness a hanging or to take part in a gunpowder plot, but Shunt’s new show is a genuinely transporting experience. With a few animal masks, the odd video clop and an ingenious use of space, they create a theatrical experience of your which seems to take place in the middle of your own migraine. The lights pulse, the walls drip, screens flicker, and somewhere amid a promenading audience, an international terrorist gang is on the loose. As if you weren’t feeling unsettled enough already.
The event begins as you are ushered into an old railway arch, asked to nominate a country and then take your place at the conference table. There are bickering delegates from China, Malta and Kazakhstan. There’s a clockwork zebra, there is a lot of comic posturing, there is chat about safe-houses here and explosions there. And then comes the order to evacuate – and an opportunity to place a bet, reopen in church, and feast you eyes at an apocalyptic finale.
Like so much of this companies work, s the experience manages to be both thrillingly absurd and cleverly atmospheric. Vast doors open out on to unexpected vistas. Burning embers reveal tangle off naked limbs. This is a show that’s full of strange connections; the sense of something revealed and not fully revealed something just beyond you. There’s room to be disorientated, eluded and surprised.
Too often there’s also room for frustration. Power politics, politically motivated violence, the way we delude ourselves that we control our live; the piece could be about any of these or none. The evening meanders and it sometimes it likes itself too much. But Shunt are also asking their visitors to lose themselves in the immediacy of their experiences. Take this sequence of encounters at face values, don’t reflect – or rather reflect just enough to be drawn in bout not so much as to find the trail false – and there’s much to enjoy.

Kate Stratton