AWARD: HERALD ANGEL
AWARD: TOTAL THEATRE BEST NEWCOMER
AWARD: EMPTY SPACE

SETTING: A PAPER AEROPLANE AROUND THE AUDIENCE COLLAPSES AND THEN ITS THE UNFORGIVING LANDSCAPE OF THE ANDES

Bobby Francois was one of the survivors of the infamous plane crash in 1972, where an amateur Uruguayan rugby team were marooned in the Andes, and ended up eating corpses to stay alive. Bobby Francois was not one of the heroes. He barely did anything to help, even to help himself. But he survived all the same.

An astounding piece of theatre - An immersive experience. Radical, original, incredible.
TIME OUT

This company are thrillingly inventive.
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

The experience is genuinely horrifying: as the plane began to spiral downwards the person next to me began to hyperventilate. Once the smoke clears and you've got over your initial sense of terror, the real horror begins. Shunt takes you to the top of a mountain where the survivors huddle in the wind and show you the end of civilisation. Very clever, very disturbing. 
THE GUARDIAN


Shunt is playing with some of the more extreme possibilities of theatrical experience.
THE SCOTSMAN

Video by Susanne Dietz Sound by Ben and Max Ringham, Andrew Rutland Lyn Gardner, 16th August 2000: "Reworked for the better since it was first seen in London last year, Shunt's show takes you into the skies and then drops you from a great height. It's based on the true story of the South American rugby team who, after crashing in the Andes, stayed alive by eating each other. The company wallow in the macabre humour of this situation in a performance piece that celebrates the importance of ritual in our lives: the absurdity of the air safety announcement; the trolley dolly with her comforting offer of drinks and peanuts; the way that even when we are reduced to cannibalism we do it with the best of table manners. From the moment you gather in the waiting room, Shunt get every detail right but skew reality with a cockeyed humour. The experience is genuinely horrifying: as the plane began to spiral downwards the person next to me began to hyperventilate. Once the smoke clears and you've got over your initial sense of terror, the real horror begins. Shunt takes you to the top of a mountain where the survivors huddle in the wind and show you the end of civilisation. Very clever, very disturbing." www.shunt.co.uk www.londontheatreblog.co.uk/mischa-twitchin-on-the-history-of-shunt-and-their-new-show-money

At high altitude, the body's caloric needs are astronomical ... we were starving in earnest, with no hope of finding food, but our hunger soon grew so voracious that we searched anyway ...again and again we scoured the fuselage in search of crumbs and morsels. We tried to eat strips of leather torn from pieces of luggage, though we knew that the chemicals they'd been treated with would do us more harm than good. We ripped open seat cushions hoping to find straw, but found only inedible upholstery foam ... Again and again I came to the same conclusion: unless we wanted to eat the clothes we were wearing, there was nothing here but aluminium, plastic, ice, and rock.

Nando Parrado - Survivor.

Created by: Shunt collective

Original cast (and devisers): Serena Bobowski | Gemma Brockis | Callum P Crouch | Hannah Ringham | David Rosenberg | Amber Rose Sealey
(and various men in the role of the orange boy)
Show direction for Edinburgh: David Rosenberg
Dramaturg: Louise Mari
Visual design: Lizzie Clachan
Sound design and composition: Ben and Max Ringham | Andrew Rutland
Lighting design: Mischa Twitchin
Video design: Susanne Dietz
Built with support from: David Farley