Amato Saltone

More akin to a club “happening” than a night at the theatre, Shunt plunges you headfirst into an alien, spatially shifting landscape in which the spectator becomes part voyeur, part participant in its strange yet familiar world.

It is difficult to write about their latest show Amato Saltone without undermining its key attribute: a recurring sense of surprise and disorientation. It is also difficult, of course, to throw off the sense that its sense of danger is entirely manufactured. You are constantly aware that - as gritty and real as it presents itself to be - these are merely different versions of a reality that isn’t real at all.

This sense is amplified here as different sections of the audience are despatched on separate journeys into fragmentary but colliding snapshots of urban life. There are dire warnings of a power cut that is going to occur thanks to an unexpected storm, and when it does, an act of unspeakable violence occurs - of which we are afforded several contrasting viewpoints. (Do not go if you are afraid of the dark, as the power cut is taken very literally).

But in an age of Big Brother, this journey both inside the house - and viewing it from outside as others view it inside - is at once intimate, voyeuristic and playful. The Shunt Collective, who have been working together for the last seven years, are re-defining the possibilities of theatre. They could still do with harnessing their undoubted ability to create atmosphere to a better narrative framework, but perhaps the absence of it is partly the point.

Mark Shenton