The deeper I go into this cavern, the more my eyes adjust to the visual temperature of space. I follow a mechanism that leads me to a miniature petrol station. Tucked away in the shadows of a former toilet, it’s Slinkachu’s Service Station. The delicate nature of this object invites me to the floor for an encounter at eye level. A door opens close to me. The moment is gone.

I am in the depths of the vaults now, squinting at a stripper through a hole in a door. I knock three times but receive no response. I move towards a constellation of light bulbs – but no sooner gone, than the stripper door opens and I miss my chance to meet the man inside…

Punchdrunk’s curation of Tunnel 228 is intriguing. It is a negotiation of art, space and performance. The composition is theatrical, with lighting, performer and structure working in unison; the space is evocative and primed for discovery; but the artwork, while clearly a prominent feature, is not the piece’s main focus. Punchdrunk are well known for presenting broken narratives and inviting their audiences to come in and pick up the pieces, but story in Tunnel 228 is as diffuse as it gets. This denial of focus, be it on performance, artwork or otherwise, creates an intriguing tension that demands further reflection here.

Art galleries are often white, geometrical spaces with clearly defined architecture. Inside the exhibition space, artwork exists in near isolation, clinically sectioned off. This state of tabula rasa allows the work to dominate. Brian O’Doherty points out In Inside the White Cube – The Ideology of The Gallery, that the existence of art is characterized by a modernity of display. The gallery gains a limbo like status, it feels eternal, complete, separate.

This status is explored in Tim Crouch’s England, currently on at the Whitechapel Gallery. It’s another meeting point between art and performance. Crouch’s text describes a heart transplant. The progression of the disease leading up to the operation is laid out in the gallery space. In an imaginary tour that starts inside the gallery and travels through churches and hospitals, we discover (through two narrated voices) the true nature of the Londoner’s disease. In the second part of the play, the audience is moved into another austere theatrical space (a conference room) where we are presented with a lecture on the ethical implications of the transplant.

For Crouch, the gallery is a setting and the artwork a landscape. The text brings out different meanings in the artwork on display, and thus the gallery becomes a protagonist in the play. The narrators speak in an atonal, informative manner, questioning the isolationist character of the white cube space and the distance it forms between exhibited art and the outside world.

In Tunnel 228, this distance is not as sharply emphasized. The vaults create a different relationship with the outside world. In his introduction to the piece, Kevin Spacey talks of a dialogue between the inside and outside of the tunnel. A dialogue about the machinery humans create, about relics and about what the past looks like in the present.

Voyeurism is where both gallery and performance meet. The experience of looking becomes a physical action. What is bold about Tunnel 228 is its attempt to use voyeurism to challenge the place of art. It is also an incentive to uncover abandoned space, to step out of the white cube, the black box, the formal space; in search of complexity and a new form of interdisciplinary performance in tune with today’s cultural landscape.

I’m still inside this landscape, this dark tunnel. I walk past Atma’s Metropolis Souls in the most fitting of settings. My face is sweating behind the mask as I face the souls, empty like a church mural. I move on and catch the recurring image of Vhils’ Boss Face. It reminds me of a Ceauşescu caricature that was once graffitied all over the metro stops, alleyways and nightclubs of Bucharest.

As I head for the exit, I turn around one more time. The space seems more convoluted now, people are walking in groups, touching the cold walls with their hands, walking past the ushers, muted bodies all too clearly defined. I try to imagine what this space has become for me. I want to be the only breathing body inside.

While I decide whether or not I’m in a giving mood, here are the publicly available facts. Tunnel 228 is a free but limited capacity art-exhibition-cum-theatrical-installation, the result of a collaboration between Punchdrunk, the Old and Young Vic theatres and a selection of contemporary artists. Booking had been open, but kept hush-hush, for four days when The London Paper gave the game away, prompting the remaining slots to book up in a matter of hours.

While I disagree with Matt Trueman’s suggestion that the freesheet’s article invited undeserving participants to the event, for three reasons – a) it smacks uncomfortably of elitism and arbitrary judgments of ‘worthiness’ to experience art; b) the article was an innocuous one on page six that would most likely only have appealed to Punchdrunk fans anyway; and c) his notional ‘deserving’ fans had a four-day headstart – he does make one vital point. Tunnel 228 isn’t meant to be found (i.e. stumbled upon at random); you’re meant to find it (i.e. actively seek it out).

The booking site, disguised behind a tacky frontpage advertising a rail cleaning service, is difficult to find unless you know you’re looking for something (if not exactly what that something will turn out to be). The entrance to the venue is nearly impossible to locate unless you’ve found the website.

Even once you’re inside, there’s no guidance to be had from the stewards: they’re mute unless they’re telling you what you aren’t allowed to do. The onus is on you; on your self-motivated voyage of discovery. Will you attempt to figure out the origin and purpose of the Rube Goldberg machine? Hunt down the man immortalised in mural form on various walls? Seek out all Slinkachu’s miniature dioramas? Or just make it your mission to explore every corner – even the ones you’re not sure you’re allowed in?

That’s all I’m giving you in the way of hints. You’ll thank me if, as Old Vic Artistic Director Kevin hopes, the tunnel reopens in the autumn, and you can experience the thrill of discovery unspoiled.

Life is mostly tranquil here at sea level. We spawn upstream in Islington and die downstream in Richmond. True, most of us lose our battles with cancer without ever having put a foot on the property ladder but this is a small price to pay to be alive in the dying glow of the Pax Americana.

I accept that there may be no reason for my existence. I gratefully acknowledge and honour imaginary Gods and their strange ways in my own strange way. There may be no broad sunlit uplands, no light at the end of the tunnel nor any tunnel either. Like Goethe’s Faust, I have failed to gain an understanding of the underlying pattern of the universe which seems to be there just for the taking. I could, like our own modern shamans, the men in white coats, develop a familiarity of the forces binding atom to atom, planet to planet and galaxy to galaxy. I could even harness those forces in a thousand useful ways: novel kitchen appliances, levitation made simple or a money growing tree perhaps. I could do all this and yet I would fail to gain knowledge. This is what I share in common with Faust.

Our incantations serve as elevator music to a cosmic maelstrom which mocks even the best crafted performance. Our mumbo jumbo is at best a side-show; our voo-doo a farce Punchdrunk’s Faust is no exception.

I went to see it again. Determined this time to rip its entrails out and read the omens scattered amongst the deconstructed scenes of Goethe’s twisted story. Who is this bastard Mephistopheles who swings from the the drainage pipes and concrete pillars of a fucked building in Wapping? Who is this impotent magician, this Dr Faust, who mocks us all by effortlessly turning into a young man. He has no right to do this and no contract even bound with blood should give us the hope that such a thing is possible. Even in jest. Even to entertain. How dare they pretend? Why do we pretend to believe them for £25? Why was I there again running like a fool up stairs and through candle-lit corridors? Why is there no answer? Why can’t I ask the right questions?

But the hopeless beauty of it. I felt the mystery as the fake preacher booted me out onto the second floor. Again for a minute I was in the nowhere. The hum of London faded. My guard dropped. My journey began and some echoes of Goethe’s story sounded clearly: Fausts’ study, Walpurgisnacht, a forest at night, a dirty witch’s kitchen. I stole sweets and laughed at some of the bloody fools running after the performers with their plastic death masks like little clockwork wind-up toys. I sprawled in a leather seat in a fake cinema and watched a few scenes of an oiled young Charlton Heston slide his way across the screen in black and white. Still no answers but for a while I didn’t feel like asking any questions.

And make no mistake, a question is at the heart of Faust: will Mephistopheles, the one time angel, be able to turn Dr Faust away from the light of reason? In other words from God? Will Dr Faust, the honourable citizen, the charlatan, turn his back on the God of the Enlightenment and seek love by the light of perverted science? Do I care? Yes.

Lend me your ears dunces: I need more smoke screens and mirrors. I need agile performers who excel in their craft. There is a chimera which will lead me to the promised land of perfect geometry and justice. There will come a time when Mephistopheles will come to claim me wearing one of his countless guises and somehow I will need the accumulated knowledge, the theatrical memory of the human species, to escape his trap and fade, fade, fade away. If not to heaven then at least at peace. Thank you Punchdrunk. Go now and sin no more.

It may be that any journey past Execution Dock is made in the company of Captain Kidd’s ghost, but I had already begun to ‘be’ in the performance well before I arrived at the venue – an imposing five-storey building in Wapping Lane. The dreary industrial architecture alone was enough to suggest that here I was indeed going to witness a pact between Man and Devil.

Glad to get out of the bitter cold, I was ushered downstairs to a bar seemingly run by ladies from the American deep South, uneasily stuck in some 1920’s hayseed and moonshine dream. It was in the men’s toilets of this establishment that my belt fell to pieces. This is actually due to wet rot in my house but you could be forgiven for seeing the hand of a wayward spirit at work.

Holding up my pants with one hand and feeling a little cold, the group I had joined was then dropped off in small groups on each of the five floors by a swaggering, drunk preacher whose dirty linen suit spoke of restless nights alone with a bible and a whiskey bottle.

By necessity, the details must stop here. What happens beyond the lift doors is largely up to you and the performers. Certainly a main story arc will guide you, but like Dr Faust’s search for the true essence of life, the performance is not a passive transit from one point to another: part of it lies beyond our comprehension. This is the slice for the Gods as Ernst Junger once described the hidden face of war.

Not that Punchdrunk purposefully indulges in obfuscation to the point that the performance is only a journey into the unknown. Key episodes from the myth of Faust have been isolated and developed and iconic cultural references have been woven into the physical appearance of the rooms, corridors and stairwells of the building.

This is perhaps where I would sound the only note of caution. It felt at times that the use of space threatened to veer into the absurd and was perhaps more in keeping with a theme park than as the physical matrix required to support the performance. The sheer size of the building is certainly an issue as is I suspect the amount of money needed to exploit such a space.

At the same time, the space is what contributes to the impression of being lost in a place that holds no memory or ego. Although it is clearly a story about ‘self’, it is not our own ‘self’ and that can be either a blessing or a curse.

A blessing because for a moment I forgot the dangerous farce that is life in London, and a curse because it asks the sort of question which theatre (nor anything else seemingly) cannot answer.

Go see it. That is all.