Facing fear: 'Money' at Shunt, Bermondsey Street

Let's get one thing straight. I don't enjoy fear. Horror films are not my thing, I hate all forms of gore, suspense really gets to me and I'm not a fan of the dark either. Oh and I'm slightly claustrophobic. You may call it boring, I call it being sane. So when a friend called me very last minute to go see a play called 'Money' by a theatre company called Shunt, had I done my research, I would have outright refused. Luckily for them, unluckily for me, I hadn't, so I agreed to go without any idea of what I was about to partake in. Sometimes in theatre this 'blind' viewing works as there is no danger of expectations not being reached and thus less chance of disappointment. For this play, however, expectation would have been a God-send. It would have provided me with a much needed suit of armour against the theatrical attack I was about to endure. Unfortunately, due to the joys of being spontaneous, I went totally unprotected.

Surprise number one arrived even before the play had started. The performance was in an old abandoned tobacco warehouse near London Bridge. So, goodbye conventional audience/stage set up. The set? A huge three-storey construct resembling an old rusting machine, equipped with dim lights, dripping fluids and the permanent sound of a train going under a tunnel. And then the action began. A Banksy-esque image of a man in riot police clothes handing out balloons commenced the show. Ten minutes of weird noises, lights flicking on and off and glimpses of people moving around in the machine structure. More dripping fluids. I guessed that we were on some kind of ship but soon realised that any attempt to fix a location or create a narrative was going to be a challenge. This is 'experiential theatre' after all. With the audience sufficiently confused, we were then led up the stairs and into the structure. Freak-out time. A dark long, thin room with billowing black sheets on either side to increase claustrophobia and two screens on either end counting down numbers. Then total darkness. For about fifteen minutes. The kind of darkness in which you can't even see your own hand right in front of your face. For someone not great with enclosed spaces, its safe to say that my paranoia mounted in direct proportion to the increasing oppressive noise blasted into this small room. And just when the tears (I kid you not) began to fill my eyes, lights up and silence. The space had been transformed into what looked like the inside of a ship with wooden walls and benches lining the room. This is what I got from the action and dialogue that ensued: We were all waiting to see a man for approval of some kind of business idea. Dragon's Den, then, but with a twist. The twist being the strange bald, semi-naked man that would intermittently descend from the glass ceiling and play catch with one of the actors. Narrative? I think not. It was at that point that I realised that I can add bald men to my list of phobias - perhaps its the uncanny childlike hairlessness, or the reminder of the creepy John Malkovich but either way, Mr Baldy sealed my state of paranoia. And just as I was getting mildly comfortable with my paranoia in that space, off we went again, this time upstairs into another room, where we seemed to be celebrating some sort of monetary success. This is where the nonsensicality and absurdity of the action, and the absence of a narrative became unimportant. The staging was incredible. Three storeys, with glass floors and ceilings meant that the action took place on three levels in three separate areas, a Victorian drawing room, a sauna and the 'dinner party' celebration upstairs. This voyeuristic viewing experience added to the secret, illicit and underground atmosphere of the whole show. And with permanent reminders of how much money this 'business', this 'machine' in which were located had made, it all began to make a little bit of sense. The dialogue obsessively began to highlight the power of money and of 'the machine', perhaps a symbol of the constantly churning banks, and of the inescapability of this power. With the actors all holding door knobs in their hands, so that leaving was impossible, this atmosphere of entrapment gradually became overwhelming and the bizarre fragments of the play, started coming together. (I later found out that the play was in fact loosely based on Zola's novel "L'argent" about the corrupt world of financial speculation, proving that Money did succeed in creating some form of atmospheric narrative). So when one of the actors told us that there had been technical difficulties, that the show had to stop, and that we could get our money back, most of the audience fixated on the word 'money'. Was this how the play would end, cleverly turning this overwhelming fixation on money back onto the audience themselves, in a Brechtian twist very much in keeping with the rest of the play? Well, no. There had been a technical fault and we were thus unable to view the last thirty minutes of the play, and we did, ironically get our money back. Whilst this was indubitably an anti-climax to the hour of suspense, our willingness to believe that this was all part of the act speaks volumes for the 'experiential' element of the performance. We were so immersed in the play and so willing to forgo any expectations that even the most mundane, realistic event was initially interpreted as theatre. And this is where the brilliance of Money lies. It was not in the dialogue, or in its characters or in the story, which, in fact, remained hard to grasp throughout. It was in its ability to totally brainwash you, to take you into another world and make you feel like the star of it, to place problems and decisions in your hands and wait for you to respond, to feel, and to experience. So despite the permanent state of paranoia, I would hugely recommend it. Go and see it, and please, let me know what happens at the end. I got my money back so I could go see it again, but I don't think my nerves could handle it.