Shutterland @ Zoo

 

In a month where dissent, disturbance and the role of the state have so dramatically become front-page news, Rhum and Clay’s dystopic creation, Shutterland, aptly offers an energetic exploration of the tensions between freedom and restraint, the individual and the system.

Set in an as yet unknown future, a blip in the system sets happily hapless clerk Lublin’s life out of joint and exposes a society that permits no deviation, no insubordination. Don’t worry, it's not all gloom and doom though. The Lecoq trained quartet bring the three components of Jacques Lecoq’s philosophy – le jeu (playfulness), complicité (togetherness) and disponsibilité (openness) – determinedly to the fore and bound, dance and gesture their way through endless bureaucracy and nonsense speak with a hefty dose of absurdity.

The playful openness of the Lecoq performance style and the closed nature of the totalitarian system Lublin exposes might seem like an odd mix. Surprisingly, it works particularly well at those points where the Lecoq method’s focus on ‘the body as the primary element of recognition of the living being’ meets the representation of the violence of the management of that body in repressive regimes.

As the actors merge from ghoulish CCTV cameras to ghastly agents of the state, the links between the two, and the human complicity in a seemingly inescapable net of surveillance and regulation, are neatly reflected for example. At other times, however – such as in the torture scene – the comic emphasis which makes this piece great fun to watch is a little jarring. Similarly, although the multiple aural, visual and narrative references to Europe’s totalitarian pasts are clever (Lublin, our hero, shares a name with the Polish city in which the strikes which eventually helped lead to the creation of Solidarity began), they, like the narrative, remain a little superficial. Vintage style slightly overshadows substance, but Shutterland is still a darling dystopia.