Back in the mid 1990s, when we had an office in Leicester Square, Stew and me would very occasionaly go swimming at the Marshall St Baths in Soho. We thought we were fat and needed to exercise. Oh if only we could have seen how fat we would become. Maybe we'd have gone swimming more than five times.
This evening I returned to the Baths to see an experimental theatre piece called
"Deep End" put on by Corridor. Like the stuff by Shunt that I mentioned recently, the audience walk around the building and discover the actors in situ. In Deep End the actors weren't doing all that much, but were like ghosts haunting the crumbling building, some of them swimmers and others characters from around Soho. Most of them stood still, hardly any of them said anything, but somehow it was incredibly fascinating and slightly spooky. Just being able to look at these people was unusual (as we're generally not allowed to stare at people in public for no reason) and they also stared back at you, which is equally strange.
But as with the Shunt stuff it was equally as intriguing just being able to walk round this wonderful old building and especially to see the pool that I used to swim in, empty of water. There was also a second pool behind which was once the second class swimming area.
As with the Shunt stuff, the wonderful thing about this sort of piece is that when you are finally ejected back into the real world everything has become part of the experience. For a short time it makes you look at the buildings and people you see in a different way. We popped into a pub for a drink and it was a nice old fashioned Soho one (the John Snow) where we had to duck through a strange half door to get to the emptiest bar. A gang of men who were clearly painters and decorators entered and they could easily have stepped out of the show. It was hard not to stare at them and their paint splattered clothing and bags, but I didn't look too much because they were already quite drunk and looked like they could easily take me in a fight situation.
