These days, “site-specific” is a label often slung around any play enacted in an uncomfortable space. Dreamthinkspeak’s marvellous work is different. It truly draws on a particular place to conjure a subject. It makes the buildings outside become vibrant with undisclosed possibilities.
The company have set a version of Crime and Punishment in a former abattoir in Clerkenwell and pursued ideas of Dante’s Paradiso up and down the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. Now they have been inspired by the little-visited subterranean places of Shoreditch town hall, and by the life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose secret parts were well attended.
Described as a promenade installation, Absent presents to the ambulant viewer a series of hotel rooms, untenanted by any live human, but populated by a recurring video and Alice Boman’s reedy sigh: “Are you coming back?” It hints at lost lives. That of an old hotel in the process of being turned into a chic corporate entity. That of the Duch, who lived in the Grosvenor House hotel, being shifted to smaller and smaller rooms as she failed to pay her bills.
When the real Duchess died in 1993, the Independent obituary explained that it had become “socially incorrect” even to speak her name. Society has got its way in this show, where there is no mention of the notorious Polaroids that showed her, naked save for a string of pearls around her neck and fellating an unidentified man – probably eminent. There is, though, scattered evidence pointing to her. Under a floorboard lie a strand of pearls, a crumpled visiting card, a packet of Black Cat cigarettes.
It is hard to argue with a show called Absent about what is not present. Yet it is hard not to look for dynamism as well as evocation. The riposte that the audience is the action will not satisfy everyone.
Still, what is here is magnificently done, forcing you to look closely, playing with scale. You walk through rooms of the old hotel, with exposed bricks and pipes and uneven floors. You see a model of all the rooms in the renovated hotel, 200 or so identical interiors arranged like pigeonholes. Only one is different: it contains the tiny upright figure of the Duchess. You peer into a doll’s house, with a beautiful hotel suite, drowning in plushness, with desk, sofa, a vase of flowers the size of a thumbnail and a teddy bear lolling on the crisp pillow. Minutes later you push open doors and walk into that suite. It is there at a discombobulating full size. It is sumptuous but saddening. Every item in the room – from bed to hairbrush – has a label on it saying “sold”.
• Absent is at Shoreditch town hall until 25 October
