The pleasure of site-responsive theatre is that it provides an opportunity to get inside unusual locations. So it proves in the latest piece from Arbonauts, a company who work on the fertile borders between installation and performance, dance and acrobatics, and who take us down the rabbit hole that is the Brunel Tunnel Shaft in Rotherhithe, south-east London.
Like Alice, you may have to telescope yourself to squeeze through the tiny entrance. Once down in the bowels of the drum-like structure with its pock-marked walls, it feels less like Wonderland and more as if you’ve accidently wandered into some kind of fetish club.
Below ground in the gloom, you discover a circular, roped, cage-like structure that spins slowly, offering glimpses of an unseeing woman who shimmers like glass, acrobats twisting and turning, a slinky masked figure and statues with bloodied faces. It’s strange and hallucinatory, the weirdness added to by the sonic soundscape and the fact we feel like voyeurs at somebody else’s fantasy.
There are too many people to allow you to move around and get a 360-degree experience, and, although it has a hypnotic quality, there is a lack of variety in the performance and choreography that makes it quite exhausting to watch. The text is hard to hear. It’s being in the tunnel shaft that is memorable, not so much what is happening there.
Arbonauts, who have previously created work in Nunhead cemetery, are attracted to the dark and mysterious, and they don’t like to give too much away. By taking that approach, they don’t necessarily do themselves any favours. I reckon that if you know the 1972 novel by Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, about a city manipulated by the inventor of a machine that makes fantasies seem real, it could help. A lot. Otherwise you risk being left completely in the dark.
- At Brunel Tunnel Shaft, London until 25 July. Details: arbonauts.org
