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Telegraph
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
London's latest immersive extravaganza is mind-scrambling – and not in a good way
It's hard to fault the intention behind London's latest immersive extravaganza – and given it's the pet project of the Georgian billionaire TV mogul Liana Patarkatsishvili one can certainly assume no expense has been spared. In its sights is the viral spread of misinformation and the algorithmic nature of knowledge in the digital age: both increasingly critical, and rich with immersive potential. But within about 20 minutes of this show – set inside a cavernous disused warehouse (formerly the paper store for News International) in Deptford – it's clear Storehouse has a cognitive crisis of its own. Have the creators been afflicted by a case of information overload, unable to discern precisely what their own project is about? Has a rogue chatbox been given access to the script? You have to wonder as the audience experience of Storehouse rapidly starts to resemble the slightly panicky, headachy feeling of being lost in a Reddit thread, buffeted by tangentially related but disparate plot strands that refuse to satisfyingly coalesce. The team behind it – which includes a staggering six co-writers – promises one of the most artistically ambitious large-scale theatre events to have ever been staged in the UK. Yet the show's scope and set-up will be familiar to anyone who has seen any of the numerous immersive shows that have sprung up in the last 15 years in the wake of Punchdrunk. Divided into groups, audiences are led inside the honeycombed interior of the eponymous Storehouse – a vast archive which, we are informed, was established in 1983 by four enigmatic visionaries to provide an analogue record of every post, meme, tweet and fact published on the internet. The hope of these founders – voiced, disappointingly intermittently, by Toby Jones, Kathryn Hunter, Meera Syal and Billy Howle – is that the archive will synthesise the morass of printed knowledge into a single noble truth about humanity. Yet the archive itself is under threat from unknown forces and the task of the audience is to find a way of preserving its ideals for future generations. At least I think that is the idea. Even the actors, which for my group included a bumbling book-binder and a suave sort of leader in perky striped trousers, at times didn't appear sure of what story they were meant to be telling. As is often the case with these shows, far more attention has been paid to the aesthetic experience than the dramatic execution. Alice Helps's set design is certainly impressive, featuring various tunnelled spaces that resemble the roots of trees or caves crammed with stalactites. There are rooms lined with old books, coloured lanterns that reveal 'truths' written onto the walls and whispering voices. There is a brief tantalising flirtation with an escape room-like puzzle involving books stained by a mysterious pattern, and an excellent wheeze involving those lanterns which, had anyone had the vision to do so, could have been developed into something richly pertinent to the show's own themes. Yet the audience has no real purpose. And the issues at stake are unclear: the plot involves a conspiracy that makes no sense, and it ends with an appeal to the audience to decide on what most gives them hope and to work towards a world full of that instead. Love, said someone. The touch of grass, another replied. Or, one might have added, a rigorous artistic response to one of the most pressing subjects of our age. Until Jun 29. Tickets: 0203 925 2998;


The Guardian
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Storehouse review – an exasperating wander through the internet's ‘arkive'
The disused warehouse given over to this immersive production was once a storehouse for newspapers (Rupert Murdoch's, in fact). So it is well suited to the show's central concern – the archiving of words, although the fictive 'arkive' stored here is for every single digital expression since the inception of the internet in 1983. The Guardian's journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. It is impressively gargantuan, with rooms as big as aeroplane hangars. Within them there are tight tunnels made of wicker or white padded material, the latter reminiscent of Punchdrunk's Viola's Room, also staged in a vast space. Conceived by Liana Patarkatsishvili and produced by Sage & Jester, Storehouse is certainly grand in ambition and immaculately conceived in design, with an intricately created lexicon, too. The backstory is that a now dead company boss conceived a global project to record every online message, meme and utterance in the hope to build the formation of a greater truth – a 'Truthtopia' – in the world above this alternate underground realm. Except that this archiving process, named 'the great aggregation', has missed its deadline for the revelation of truth. We meet its employees who seem willingly imprisoned underground and frozen in time like New Romantic throwbacks. They follow random rules such as falling into dance every time Culture Club's Karma Chameleon is blasted out of a loudspeaker. We, the audience, are positioned as trustees of the company and are being shown around in the hope to inject fresh blood amid low morale and a recruitment crisis. There are shades of Severance to the setup, with blind obedience among some employees rubbing up against the discontent and disobedience of others. Alongside, there are also echoes of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and HG Wells's The Time Machine. It's a melange, with too many themes, and none of the dread, drama or tension that should accompany them. So the ideas float aimlessly in this great space without being tethered to enough actual story. The script has been conceived in a writers' room usually associated with US screen dramas. This brings no less than six co-writers (Katie Lyons, Tristan Bernays, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Kathryn Bond, Caro Murphy and Rhik Samadder) alongside story producer, Donnacadh O'Briain. It seems like a case of too many cooks; dialogue spins from data control to algorithms, the (mis)use of information, truths and lies ('Truth lies here' is a perplexing refrain). Themes are not only telegraphed but tub-thumped in the final scene with big questions thrown out to the audience such as: 'What gives you hope?' ('My cat,' says one participant). There is earnest talk of tree hugging and disconnecting from social media. It's nothing you do not already know, with no new take to offer. Disembodied instructions are spoken through the public address system across the rooms (the voices of Toby Jones, Meera Syal, Billy Howle and Kathryn Hunter), and four combinations of cast perform the show simultaneously. Having seen two of these performances, I am still uncertain of why. Some actors bring a little more depth to their character, especially Harriett O'Grady as a stacker (responsible for organising shelving of data) along with Chris Agha and Dawn Butler as bookbinders. It all comes together around a giant inkwell, when the plot is revealed in what seems like a Scooby-Doo style ending, with motives and culprits fully explained amid rather too basic reasoning. Despite the alarm sounds and disturbed lighting through the show, there is no danger or jeopardy. The final moments open up to big electronic sound, laser light and Kraftwerk concert optics (lighting design by Ben Donoghue, sound design by James Bulley). It looks spectacular. If only there was more meaning in it. At Deptford Storehouse, London, until 20 September