The experimental performance collective Shunt aren’t short of a bob or two. Having started life just over 10 years ago, holed up in some dingy railway arches in Bethnal Green, their relocation to a vast labyrinth of vaults beneath London Bridge station in 2004 coincided with support from various funding bodies. Next year, Arts Council England will be stumping up a handsome £150,000 to keep them in business.

I’m not pointing this out in order to demand they account for every penny - though some may emerge so baffled and bemused from their latest show, Money, a radical response to Zola’s 1890 novel L’Argent, that they rail against the idea of their receiving a single sou in subsidy. However there’s such a huge gulf between the resources lavished on the technical aspects of this production and the detail invested in the text you’re forced to think about the cost of it all. And that, oddly enough, intentionally or otherwise, takes you to the heart of Zola’s work, which was inspired by the notorious collapse - in 1882 - of the Union Generale. By leaving you feeling awed by its big-bucks spectacle and short-changed by its hard-to-follow script, the piece makes you consider the nature of scams.


Without wishing to give too much away, half-way down Bermondsey Street, round the corner from their London Bridge vaults, Shunt have set up a second home in an old tobacco warehouse once owned by Fidel Castro. Inside stands a towering metallic edifice, wreathed with stairways and steaming piping. Absurdly guarded by modern riot-police clutching colourful helium-balloons, so that it resembles an outlandish fun-fair attraction, it fills the air with much ominous grinding, clanking and rumbling.

Summoned inside this three-storey ‘abandoned relic of Victorian technology’ - and instantly bamboozled by an infernal round of pitch-darkness and deafening noise, you’re introduced to a handful of locations that combine 19th-century and modern ambiences. Figures prowl above and below you, glimpsed through ingenious sections of transparent flooring, engendering a vague mood of suspense and debauched excitement.

In a plush ante-chamber you watch comically incompetent beret-wearing guards handle a bearded entrepreneur who is seeking to win the backing of an inscrutable Jewish banker in order to get impossibly rich quick. In a champagne-bar upstairs, you’re invited to hurl plastic lotto-style baubles about the place, while eavesdropping on mysterious conversations taking place in a parlour and sauna below.

What does it all mean? Even Zola would have been stumped. There’s so much cryptic nonsensicality coursing through this 90-minute affair that it’s probably best to relax and let it wash over you. That way you can emerge none the wiser yet curiously refreshed.