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Storehouse by name; storehouse by nature. This immersive, site-specific show takes place in a vast warehouse in Deptford, south London — and by vast, we are talking 9,000 square metres — once used as a paper depot by Rupert Murdoch’s News International. That history feels apt: Storehouse is a piece about information, misinformation and disinformation, delivering a hefty warning about how fragile facts have become in the digital age. It’s created by Liana Patarkatsishvili, founder of Sage & Jester productions, who, as a Georgian-born media executive, brings keenly felt personal experience to the project.
It’s a great location, an immensely pressing subject and the show is admirably ambitious, designed and choreographed with skill and care. Participants progress in small groups through snaking tunnels into fantastical enclosures or rooms packed with period detail, finally coming together in a climactic scene which encourages everyone to be vigilant in tackling misinformation. But timely as this message is, what holds it back is the narrative. The plot is so jumbled, implausible and bewildering that it undermines the impact. The script is the work of a writers’ room, which may be one of the problems.
It starts out well. Audiences are cast as trustees of a huge organisation dedicated to the preservation of knowledge. We assemble in small groups to learn about the aims of the company founders: to archive in analogue form every piece of digital information shared since the birth of the internet, leading to “the great aggregation” — the miraculous synthesis of all this content into one, huge, life-changing truth. But the deadline for this seismic event has passed and now the employees are spiralling; even the building seems to be collapsing. Ink drips from the ceilings; the walls creak and groan eerily (sound design by James Bulley).
Our job, as trustees, is to help. The disembodied voices of the company founders — played by Billy Howle, Kathryn Hunter, Toby Jones and Meera Syal — chant motivational phrases as we head off to meet the stressed employees toiling away, binding online utterances into books or stacking them on shelves. My first encounter is with a bookbinder who bustles anxiously about a workroom bulging with paper, glue samples, old-school printing paraphernalia and bits of 1980s tech. He talks us through his flummoxing process of packaging up every iota of online info.
But before we’ve even got to grips with this, he is interrupted by other panicked employees. We’re shepherded to a quasi-religious ceremony to reaffirm the principles of the company, then a session with a stacker and finally a communal denouement where we learn about a rather garbled conflict within the company between truth and control. The narrative is so bitty, and laced with so much jargon-heavy detail, that it becomes downright confusing. Meanwhile the whimsical elements of the fictitious world — magical lanterns; mysterious patterns; the fact that the workers don’t age — undercut the seriousness of the real-world application.
Alice Helps’s design and Ben Donoghue’s lighting are striking, the cast work very hard and the piece pulses with ambition and serious intent. But this overburdened, muddled show misses its potential.
★★☆☆☆
To September 20, sageandjester.com
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