Tropicana (review)

The Shunt Theatre Collective, recognized as one of London's most innovative, nontraditional, site-specific companies, recently found itself in the glare of London's cultural spotlight when Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, included Shunt's Tropicanain its own production season. Many of London's critics responded by dismissing Tropicanaas meaningless. Yet the production may also be figured as an uncompromising and effective effort to locate an alternative to conventional staging and traditional linearity.

Shunt's challenge to more conventional performance protocols commenced even before the play began and continued throughout the evening. After herding the audience into a dank section of London's Underground, the Shunt performers assaulted them with non sequiturs and aural and visual effects. These disorienting devices evoked provocative themes, including the blurring of lines between humans and other animals, human capacities for deception and violence, as well as proclivity for painful self-examination and growth. While illuminating these themes, Tropicanaplayfully mocked popular forms of theatre beginning with entry into the performance space.

The audience of approximately two hundred met at the London Bridge Tube stop and, in groups of twenty, passed through a door into a small room next to the elevator lift. No production program or guide provided direction or orientation. Several audience members noticed an adjacent custodial room with the door open and the light on, and entered the space together. On the table lay an incomplete jigsaw puzzle of a dog which we quickly completed. An attendant entered the room, reacted in shock and dismay to the completed puzzle, then brusquely ushered us into a lift. We descended and were taken to a room where a man stood on a raised platform, babbling about the inequality of his work conditions. Next to him a television showed a man silently playing with a dog. The man on the platform indicated we would have to find our own way out, then disappeared. These initial scenes—the jigsaw puzzle obviously planted for someone to complete, and the man forcing the audience to determine when and where to move next—indicated that Tropicanawould be not only site-specific, but interactive as well.

Audience members left the room and entered a vast space made up of three chambers. We walked cautiously, sometimes in dim light, sometimes in total darkness penetrated by flashes of light as shadowy figures in the distance appeared and disappeared furtively around corners. The dominant sound was the "ping" of an elevator bell with a voice announcing ever-increasing depths: "100 meters," "150 meters." Other sounds included simple musical chords of varying volume interspersed with the barking of dogs and screeching of cats. The audience finally sat around the perimeter of the three chambers connected by archways. The lights remained dim, the sounds constant and often jarring, with sense disorientation apparently the objective. The lights began pulsating slowly as some actors began a threatening movement toward selected audience members.

The ten members of the Collective then engaged in a series of mysterious and often haunting activities intended to intensify our disorientation and explore the theme of animal assimilation. A man stood in a pool of light, embracing and kissing a dog on the mouth. Light pulsated as the kiss became more passionate and the head of the dog transformed into that of a woman. The two most penetrating images included an elevator lift that floated through the chamber horizontally, containing a horizontal occupant. A hearse carrying a corpse soon followed, pulled and pushed by women in showgirl costumes with feathered headpieces evoking birds in a tropical locale and providing the main clue for the title. As the hearse continued to move through our space, the sound of crashing waves layered onto the animal sounds.

Guides then ushered the audience into a chamber where the hearse had come to a stop. Accompanied by live music on an electric guitar, the corpse, also a showgirl, came to life and writhed in anger and fear within and outside the hearse. Other showgirls danced seductively through the audience and...