All theatre takes you on a journey. But Tropicana, presented by the Shunt collective in collaboration with the National Theatre, literally leads the audience on a mystery tour through the vaults under London Bridge station. Some may find the experience disturbingly disorientating: all it did for me was expose the intellectual poverty of so much that passes for avant-garde theatre in Britain.
The journey occupies roughly three stages. Apparently descending in a lift, we are ushered into a dusty, cage-filled room where a menacing figure announces, "I'm a dog trapped in the spirit of a man," and warns of impending dangers. We then move into what looks like a looted wine-cellar where surreal images emerge out of almost total darkness: a horizontal elevator floats past, feathered showgirls loom out of the gloom, disembodied feet pass by. Eventually we glimpse a hearse on which the entertainers dance acrobatically.
After a brief interval, in which beer is dispensed from the hearse's coffin - irresistibly reminding me of Some Like it Hot - we get to sit in a sepulchral operating theatre. Here we are confronted by the corpse of the lift-attendant who brought us down. A team of mock doctors probe his innards with indecent glee, hacking their way through the bones and viscera before producing one or two surprising objects. Finally, we are invited to drink at the Tropicana bar before being released into the reassuring bustle of London Bridge.
I describe all this in some detail to give you a flavour of the experience and to prove that all it really amounts to is theatre of infantile shock and sensation. The basic idea is that we are descending into an illusory underground world filled with strange images of death. But this is not Dante or Virgil. It is simply an extended party trick in which we undergo temporary sense deprivation and find our ears assaulted by howling animals and fragmented musical chords. The intention, I guess, is to plunge us into a living nightmare: the result, however, wouldn't frighten a rabbit.
Watching this pointless charade, I was reminded of infinitely more stimulating pieces of underground theatre. Five years ago John Berger and Complicité's Simon McBurney joined forces to take us on a trip beneath the Aldwych tube station in The Vertical Line: there we were memorably confronted by Egyptian funerary portraits and evocations of the recently discovered Chauvet cave-paintings.
We were disorientated in the same way we are in the Shunt show. But the experience had a purpose which was to prove that supposedly primitive artists understood all about space and perspective.
Site-specific theatre can also be used to illuminate the classics. There's a brilliant example in Out of Joint's Macbeth, currently at London's Arcola theatre, which takes us from room to room as if we were complicit in the hero's journey into hell and damnation. Intriguingly that Macbeth uses precisely the same trick as Tropicana in showing how a head may suddenly appear out of nowhere.
But in Macbeth it impacts directly on the narrative, whereas in Tropicana it is simply a theatrical trick.
I realise theatre is changing and is no longer confined to prescribed spaces. But I am reminded of a story told by the great Brazilian pioneer Augusto Boal, who has taken theatre into all kind of public places.
He was devising a show with oppressed maidservants in Latin America and was looking for some neglected mansion in which to stage the work. The servants were absolutely horrified and told him in no uncertain terms they wanted to work in a proper theatre with lights and dressing-rooms.
The point is that the search for "found spaces" is in danger of turning into a bourgeois game for those bored with conventional theatres. When the show matches the space, as in Bill Bryden's remarkable 1990s play set in a defunct Glasgow shipyard, the result can be astonishing. But Tropicana, although skilfully performed, offers little more than mild titillation for jaded theatrical appetites.
And, in spite of the National Theatre's backing, it shows that behind Shunt lies a theatrical stunt.
