A man who looks a bit like a drag Jesus in a white wig and black dress stands on an upturned shipping container surrounded by baby dolls in a pool of green water, playing a few chords whose mournfulness would give Eels a run for their gloomy dime. Another man – less Jesus more Boris Johnson meets Chucky, with a waft of blonde hair and facemask peeling at the lips – drunkenly embarrasses himself in a sticky-floor hellhole of a nightclub. A luscious rainforest stretching for miles turns out to be a trick to do with mirrors.
Two days on, Shunt’s new installation The Boy Who Climbed Out of his Face – which has popped up on The Jetty, a new arts-come-outdoor bar venture on the Thames at North Greenwich – unfolds in my mind like swiping through photos on my phone: a batch of images of things that seemed worth capturing at the time but retrospectively aren’t as exciting as I’d thought, and whose coherence as a whole is flimsy. The show is a barefooted wander around a web of shipping containers, passing through a series of images, scenes and encounters that are often on the brink of reality, either as a result of apparent madness or fantastical distortion. Above the whiff of confusion and smelly feet you can just about pick up the scent of two proclaimed source texts – a disorientation of the unfamiliar and being forced to react to it echoing The Heart of Darkness, and the mysterious, anti-fairytale underwater rebirth of The Water Babies.
Inevitably for a room-by-room performance, some segments are stronger than others. There are a couple of gorgeous set-pieces – a neat trick of perspective in the journey between the first and second rooms, and a section in near total darkness in a shipping container to a soundtrack of ocean waves that teases out terrifying fears of what might happen on your sea journey (and is perhaps especially resonant given the Tilbury Docks story). There are enough vague connections between the segments – masks, water, journeying – to encourage you to look for an overarching link, but probably not enough to find one. Where some might see Jesus, Sisyphus and a journey through the afterlife refracted through madness and water, others might see Brazil, Treasure Island and a bar on Hanway Street they’d rather not have been reminded of; and perhaps the most satisfying route through is to take each image on its own terms and quell your thirst for anything broader.
Some moments linger longer than others; re-reading The Water Babies a couple of days later encourages me to revisit some of The Boy…‘s images. Perhaps Kingsley’s rallying call for the Victorian poor was in there somewhere: on a couple of occasions basic assumptions about self and other are challenged (we are momentarily surprised that a man collecting bottles in a desert is surprised to find us behind him; an image, phrase or audience member is sometimes recontextualised by the following segment), and at times there’s an encouragement to reconsider the lot we’ve been given, starkly framed in the final scene with a baby doll flapping around in water amidst of pile of supposedly dead compatriots. But if that is the wreck of Kingsley’s book it’s pretty well submerged.
The Boy…‘s flimsiness isn’t, of course, inherently due to a lack of narrative or coherence in favour of image or sensation; Shunt have kept us guessing with glorious invitations to open-endedness many times in the past. Rather The Boy… falls down because, despite the strength of a few segments, with barely a few minutes in each room and (perhaps I was unlucky) very little interaction with your fellow dozen or so wanderers, it all feels a bit insubstantial. A 45-minute joyride of disorientation through a series of madness-come-fantasy chambers with neither guidebook nor handrails that spits you out at the other end might have worked had the ride itself been all encompassing or the images themselves more consistently powerful; but with many segments either frustratingly fleeting or simply tedious (many encounters rely on a similar trick of darkness that soon becomes tired and others, like the nightclub scene, are laden with repetition), I often found myself mid-segment searching for somewhere new to look or something to do, and finding The Boy”¦ only surface-deep.
Looking for something to do, too, in a setting that demanded more. Emerging from the show at dusk, a few hundred yards upstream from The Jetty the red cable cars of the Emirates Air Line hung across the Thames; downstream, the silver towers of the Thames Barrier rose up out of the river; and between them lay a great stretch of Thames with trees growing out of it, a burnt out Zeppelin, abandoned boats and a hundred bits of urban junk, all distorted by their reflection from the City’s lights. And in the middle of all this, The Jetty – a pile-up of pallets and blankets, a shipwreck of sweet potato fries, £5.50 pints and Prosecco on tap, stunningly out of sync with The Boy”¦ itself, the show’s alluring final image quickly shattered by Wheatus covers in the pop-up bar beneath and an overheard row about refried beans. To pop up here and not engage with that landscape seems criminal; but I guess that’s OK coz the view’s really nice, right?