Standing vast on Convoys Wharf in Deptford, London, this storehouse was once a newspaper warehouse, a place where boundless information was stored, sorted, and disseminated. It seems a perfect fit for production company Sage & Jester to have it transformed into an immersive performance, Storehouse. Here, the building’s new sacred mission is to archive every piece of information ever published online, “good, bad or ugly”, encoded in 0-1 binary, in service of the holy ideal of “Aggregation” – the pursuit of truth. You, the audience, wandering beneath its soaring ceiling easily outsizing Punchdrunk’s The Burnt City, are one of their “trustees.”
Inspired by its founder and concept creator Liana Patarkatsishvili, Storehouse intends to tackle the issue of “manipulation in the information space”, not in a lecture hall but through a live immersive experience. From the outset, the audience is led by a “stacker and bookbinder”, whose over-enthusiastic but slightly bumbling demeanour may remind you of Sybill Trelawney from the Harry Potter series. Throughout the journey, we meet other staff members with their own views and attitudes toward Storehouse’s grand purpose of Aggregation.
The overall design by Alice Helps is grandiose and magnificent: a nostalgic, 20th-century industrial dream-core aesthetic for a honeycomb design binding room; a Cthulhu-fairy style chamber covered with soft, amorphous texture resembling jellyfish tentacles where resides the “Storehouse shrine”; as well as a treehouse-style “seminar room”, making us feel as if Storehouse itself is an eternal, ever-living tree, and we are in its rhizome, carrying out secret missions. Donoghue’s lighting design breathes life into this humongous creature, while James Bulley’s sound design renders this workplace simultaneously vivid and haunting.
However, despite its ambitious scope with its impressive scale of six co-writers (Katie Lyons, Tristan Bernays, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Kathryn Bond, Caro Murphy and Rhik Samadder) and a story producer (Donnacadh O’Briain), the narrative itself lies naïve, over-simplified, disjointed, and didactic. Basically, it’s a cyber-contextualised 1984 meets The Stanley Parable, but clearly, immersive theatre remains a young art form that needs to learn so much from video games.
From a linear narrative perspective, the structure lacks coherence and internal logic. The classic “awakened staff vs. loyally obedient ones” is barely backed by character development and/or background stories. Where backgrounds are hinted at, they often reduce into heavy-handed moral messaging about race, religion, gender equality, or the importance of hope and human connection. These themes are undeniably vital, but they need to be embodied through genuine storytelling, not presented as shallow and plain manifestation.
From an immersive perspective, the audience feels more like museum visitors guided by staff who encourage you to “explore” their warehouse by implementing one or two interactive devices, instead of being part of the story. In fact, some more commercially driven immersive experiences in London provide a greater sense of agency. Here, the audience’s role remains that of outsiders, with limited agency to affect or interrogate. Again, while the aforementioned motifs are noble, the interaction fails to lead us toward personal reflection to address the vitality in those motifs.
The final scope is majestic and enlightening, with Donoghue’s blue shade washing the entire storehouse thoroughly, scattered by amber lanterns we carry along with our journey. It is indeed a poetic and lyrical moment, as if we eventually ascend from the shadowy rhizomatic underworld to a vastness of new land – another Promethean mise-en-scène.
