Money

Nobody could accuse the experimental theatre company Shunt of being obsessed with narrative. So Zola's nineteenth-century novel 'L'Argent' is an unexpected inspiration for its latest show. Anyone who has read Zola's topical attack on the murky world of financial speculation will surely be able to read between the few lines of 'Money'. For the rest of us, it's more a question of soaking up the atmosphere in the old tobacco warehouse in which Shunt has built a vast, smouldering engine.

At first it seems as if the company has taken a Meyerhold-like interest in the relationship between man and machines, but then we are taken inside the machine to a waiting room. Unpredictable ushers assert their authority, a banker in a frock coat solemnly wheels himself across the floor, and a wild-looking creature with feathers stuck to his face descends from the rafters. These images are intriguing, but the best is yet to come. Conducted to a higher level, we are treated as potential speculators. As we celebrate, the lights slowly come up through the floor so we can peer voyeuristically through Perspex glass, not just to the floor below but to the floor below that. On the one side is a sauna in which two men crank up the heat; on the other a nineteenth-century sitting room where a baby wails in a pram.

'Money' never threatens to illuminate our current economic state, nor is it without its experimental-theatre clichés. But Shunt typically conjures up a brilliant coup de thé‚tre that will linger in the memory long after more coherent shows have vanished.