📍Deptford Storehouse

⭐ ⭐ ⭐

Sage and Jester, founded by Liana Patarkatsishvili, is a new immersive theatre company and has entered the London theatre scene with a huge splash. Reminiscent of companies such as Punch Drunk, their first production Storehouse involves the complete transformation of an old printing warehouse in the depths of South East London. The result is undoubtedly breath-taking and visually is everything you could want from an immersive experience. However, while its design cannot be faulted, unfortunately there was little heft to their complex tale, and I left with a feeling of underwhelmed confusion.

Storehouse mixes fact with fiction; at the beginning of the experience audience are informed that they are trustees of Storehouse – a recently uncovered digital database storing a complete archive of the internet since its inception. The setting remains in London, fusing the real world with the imagined. The four founders of Storehouse had a mission: to collect all digital data in the pursuit of an ultimate truth, which they believed would reveal itself in an event referred to as ‘The Aggregation’. However, the Aggregation date has been and gone, and no truth has been revealed. In fact, employees at the Storehouse sense that something is very wrong, and seem increasingly overwhelmed by the amount of ‘fake news’ on the internet, making it difficult to responsibly file the data. It becomes the job of the trustees (audience), to uncover what is going wrong at Storehouse. The vibe combines a vibrant 80s sci-fi aesthetic with an almost supernatural cult-like feel, and certainly makes an interesting premise!

Alice Helps’s design is spectacular. Each room is both incredibly vast and grand, whilst simultaneously upholding minute detail. Coupled with Ben Donoghue’s lighting and James Bulley’s sound, it is truly a feast for the senses. It is engaging enough to simply wander from room to room and explore the tiny details of a desk, or bookshelf, and bask in the atmosphere created by this stellar design team. A staggeringly impressive feat. Similarly, the performances are consistent and well-rounded; the actors for my group were Scott Karim, Darryl Bailey and Dawn Butler and all were confident in carrying the unpredictable nature of immersive theatre, adding tension and atmosphere where required and diligently delivering exposition-heavy dialogue.

Storehouse requires a lot of world-building – both literally through its stunning design, but also in its concept. Overall, the storyline introduces several threads that are left unexplored, and it feels as though the world-building requires too much for an experience which is just over an hour long. Similarly, the finale, where the mysterious issues of the Storehouse are revealed and audience are brought into this realisation, actors did their best with fairly stilted dialogue and did their utmost to deliver an emotively powerful performance, but unfortunately with the plot’s confusion leading up to this point, it was difficult to evoke such emotion from the audience. Interestingly, Storehouse had a writer’s room of six co-writers and one wonders if it were a case of ‘too many cooks’. It feels as though it was intended as a cautionary tale of misinformation, questioning whether humankind can withstand the speed of digital evolution, but sadly the premise felt over-complicated, whereas the delivery felt under-baked. Ultimately, the experience was thoroughly enjoyable and engaging, but for me didn’t feel as provocative as was perhaps intended.

Sage and Jester have a clear vision of creating theatre with purpose, and Patarkatsishvili writes passionately about this pressing issue of disinformation in her programme foreword, stating that ‘we cannot simply outsource vigilance; we must each become active participants in the information landscape.’ Certainly Sage and Jester have all of the creative resource to create something powerful and provocative, and I very much look forward to seeing what is next for this company!

🎟️ Tickets and information: https://sageandjester.com/shows/storehouse/