Up until the final 15 minutes it’s a curiosity, an experiment for experimentation’s sake. We, the audience, are both stage and set dressing. Adrian , the archetypal gushing theatre enthusiast, speaks up from among our ranks, encouraging conversation, an exchange of views. Other performers, including Crouch himself, playing himself, reveal themselves in our midst one by one. Between them they recount a story surrounding a fictional production staged by Crouch.

Except they aren’t just relating their experiences of this notional production: an in-yer-face affair crammed with violence and abuse that has caused audience members both to walk and to pass out. They’re apologising for their part in it. Apologising to us, the audience, because theatre makers are beholden to their audiences. They need us, the consumers of their art, to understand their intentions and to forgive them.

And until those final 15 minutes that’s all The Author is: an acknowledgement of the absolute power the audience wields, seasoned with interrogations of the audience’s ingrained reluctance to exercise that power, to intervene in events onstage, however reprehensible they find them. It’s all necessary to prime us for what comes next, but it takes its sweet time doing so, and in the meantime it all feels a bit insular, a bit inconsequential, even a bit masturbatory: the mores of the theatre being discussed, by theatre makers, through the medium of theatre, using a fictional piece of theatre as an allegory, to theatregoers.

Then comes the turnaround, and in those final 15 minutes The Author is revealed for what it has really been all along: a daring act of self-flagellation by Crouch on behalf of provocative art and controversial artists. Personally present, without the ablative armour of a fictional character, and having questioned for over an hour why audiences choose not to act against onstage villainy, the playwright reveals himself as the worst kind of villain, or at least the most easily demonised. There’s nothing insular or inconsequential about his closing monologue, delivered to a pitch-dark auditorium – and yes, people sitting close to him do plead with him to stop, though not forcefully enough for him actually to do so.

The medicinal value of this bitter little pill remains to be seen. If next month The Stage reports mass walk-outs and stage invasions at Sarah Kane revivals, we’ll know it had some effect; but I suspect the thick sugary coating may well interfere with the active ingredients, and a few patients will undoubtedly refuse to swallow the pill at all.

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.