Amato Saltone
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Shunt Follows Tropicana up with Saltone in Vaults

Award-winning alternative theatre company Shunt - championed by the National Theatre’s artistic director Nicholas Hytner – will premiere a new show at its specially reclaimed base in London Bridge. Amato Saltone opens on 24 November 2005 (previews from 19 October).

Shunt is a group of artists who have been working together for seven years, creating large-scale performance events in unusual spaces in London. In 2003, the company’s Dance Bear Dance won Time Out's live award and the Peter Brook Empty Space Award. The National helped to finance Shunt’s next show, Tropicana, the first production in a three-year residency at the newly entitled Shunt Vaults, a 70,000 square-foot labyrinth of railway arches under London Bridge railway station. Amato Saltone is the experimental group’s second piece in the Vaults.

The new show is described as an eccentric, paranoid view of the metropolis, full of suspense, mistaken identity and an unspeakable interest in what the neighbours are doing. It explores how people’s attitudes have changed since the beginning of the ‘war on terrorism’ and more specifically since the attacks on London.

Amato Saltone is inspired by the work of Cornell Woolrich (1903 – 1968), who for over 35 years fed the pulp magazines with countless stories of steamy mystery fiction. Many films have been adapted from his work, most famously Hitchcock's Rear Window and Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black, which has earned him the title "father of film noir”. In the Shunt piece, the audience follows a frightened little guy in a tiny apartment with no money, no job and anxiety consuming him like a cancer. He’s obsessed by fear, guilt and loneliness, breakdown and despair, and a sense that the world is controlled by malignant forces preying on us.

Two performances will be presented each night, from Wednesday to Sundays, at 7.30pm and 9.30pm at the Vaults in Joiner Street, London Bridge.

- by Caroline Ansdell

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