Synopsis In a tobacco warehouse by London Bridge sits the giant centrepiece of our great industrial exposition - an abandoned relic of Victorian technology. The original purpose of the machine is unknown. If it were built today it would probably fit into the palm of your hand but, in that Golden Age, colossal bulk was the plat du jour. The future is behind us. The end of the empire is just around the corner. Money takes place in an extraordinary three-storey set built in the centre of an empty warehouse in Bermondsey Street. The audience are led inside, where the action unfolds around, above and below them. But all is not well with the machine. It hisses steam; over-stressed gears throb and grind beneath our seats. The lights keep going out and the jukebox is on the blink. Meanwhile a strange, feral child is stalking the ventilation ducts... Inspired by Émile Zola’s novel L’Argent - which was in turn inspired by the events surrounding the collapse of the Union Générale - a nineteenth century French banking fiasco. Dispensing with most of the text, Shunt reshape the work in their inimitable aesthetic of fractured narrative, electrifying imagery and all-out sensory assault. Money is loud, disorientating and absurd - a unique theatrical experience that puts the audience in the thick of it. Running time approx 90mins This event takes place at 42-44 Bermondsey Street, London, SE1 (5 minutes walk from the Shunt Vaults)
Lucy Prebble based her current uber-hit Enron on the 2001 bankruptcy of the eponymous US energy company. Theatre collective Shunt have delved further into the history of financial failures for the inspiration behind its new show, Money: the 19th-century collapse of French bank Union Generale.
Presentationally, there are other striking parallels between the two plays. In Enron, battle in a crucial scene is pitched with neon light sabres; in Money, with multi-coloured bouncing balls. In Enron, velociraptors represent complex debt solutions, in Money, a sooty, feathered creature haunts proceedings. And in both, there is the constant monitoring of stock prices, as well as euphoric champagne toasts.
But whereas Enron is fiendishly well structured in its dramatic arc, you never know where you are with Money. It takes its title from Emile Zola’s 1891 novel, on which it’s very loosely based – very being the operative word.
Zola’s story concerns an anti-Semitic financier named Aristide Saccard who, in pursuit of rapid fortune, sets up a bank to fund rail lines and other public works in the Middle East. To prop up the unstable institution, he manipulates the share price via a dummy syndicate that buys up his own stock, but his chief rival, a Jewish financier named Gundermann, learns of the illegal practice and engineer’s Saccard downfall.
Even if you’ve committed the novel to memory, you’re likely to feel lost in Shunt’s retelling. That could be a major failing, but in some ways it’s also a strength because it adds to the disorientating – and oddly hypnotic - effect of the overall experience.
The real star of the show here is the magnificent set. In a tobacco warehouse off Bermondsey Street - not far from the Shunt Vaults at London Bridge, where the group’s last new show Amato Saltone opened in 2006 and its cabaret nights continue to pull in the crowds – Money plays out in a three-story house of industrial horrors. According to the press release, it’s an “abandoned relic of Victorian technology” whose original purpose is unknown.
In fact, it’s an extraordinary design feat, a year in the making. The audience are led in by riot police and, over 90 minutes, with a constant cacophony of machine hisses and groans echoing in the background, we follow the action from level to level, sometimes taking place around us, sometimes viewed through a prism of movable floor and ceiling tiles revealing pools, apartments and other hidden nooks and crannies. Our travels begin and end in a middle chamber with tiered seating, first a sort of Dragon’s Den-style waiting room, later a parliamentary chamber where political fingers are pointed to explain away the disaster.
The mythical machine that we’re touring is also held up by Aristide as the model for the pitch he’s making. So it symbolises at once the past, the present that we’re experiencing and, as Aristide keeps declaring, “the future”. Plus ca change, as both Money and Enron - and the economic disasters that they recount - prove again and again.
An extraordinary 'set' in search of a play! After waiting in a dis-used factory / warehouse amongst helmeted security guards listening to an intimidating soundscape and watching incomprehensible videos, around 75 of you enter what looks like a free-standing three-story machine. After a period of complete darkness with the soundscape getting scarier, the cloth walls disappear and the lights go up and you find yourself in a wood-panelled debating chamber. You later ascend one level to a bar with a four-sided balcony overlooking the glass ceiling of the debating chamber and, when it's carpet tiles are removed, beyond that to two rooms another level below - a sauna and a living / dining room. People occasionally move between levels through the ceiling / floor. The problem is the narrative is so obtuse and impenetrable that you're left with just the spectacle. Worse still, on the night I went a handful of audience members destroyed the atmosphere by inappropriately interacting with the piece as if they were at playschool. The design, though, is in a class of its own. Having been to see 'Life is a Dream' on Monday, here left feeling it may all have been a dream. - Gareth James
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