Absurd City

An immersive theatre show in a Westfield is not, on the face of it, an obvious match. The fact that Absurd City creators Wake the Tiger – who have a sister venue in Bristol – insist on calling this new Shepherd’s Bush attraction an ‘amazement park’ does not make my heart sing. The adverts, featuring a wacky-looking pigeon, do little to inspire confidence that this is going to be significantly different to the sort of insta-fodder immersive experiences that have popped up all over the capital in recent years.

As it turns out, Absurd City is really good. Maybe not Punchdrunk good. But as good as large-scale immersive work gets away from the masters. It boasts ravishing, highly detailed, creepy/funny design and a modest but engrossing plot that you can choose to engage with or not, (plus a cheeky anti-capitalist message that gains an added piquancy from the giant mall outside.)

I’m not quite clear if I missed a little bit of intro or not, but there’s certainly very little ado as you ascend four sets of escalators and enter the Absurd City itself. What is the Absurd City  you ask? Well at first it does seem to be a succession of cool insta-friendly rooms. Crucially, they’re very cool insta-friendly rooms: we enter through a weird dilapidated plane; there’s a room shaped like a giant elongated phone box, where the ceiling is all phones; there’s a room full of rubber ducks; a sweetshop manned by a creepy mannequin made of sweets; a gigantic banana; that sort of thing.

Part of the reason it looks so cool and can afford such a big space is that rather than being built from scratch, it creatively upcycles KidZania, the ‘city for kids’ that stood on the site until it abruptly went out of business a couple of years ago. The sets and routes through them have been heavily modified, but the fact there were numerous buildings ready made – plus random things like part of an actual aeroplane – has really upped the production values in a massive and entirely positive way. 

Wake the Tiger was founded by the team behind the highly theatrical Boomtown Fair festival, and drifting down various hidden alleys and back passages it occurred that you can imagine the playing well to pie-eyed revellers at a hippie festival, as well as to children.

Ultimately Absurd City can be whatever you want it to be

Lore is drip-dripped out via screen, documents and graffitied scrawls. The Absurd City exists on a twin planet to Earth, which we can visit via a portal that doesn’t seem to allow the locals to visit us. It’s a highly polluted, post-industrial planet, and the city itself is under a giant dome, with power provided by a miraculous giant plant called the Genny, with the city’s operations overseen by an AI with a dog avatar called REX.

None of this actually explains why the city is so impractically wacky in design and I think it is important to understand that it really does on one level exist as delicious social-media fodder. But after tinkering with a few electronic terminals you’ll soon encounter the city’s resistance movement, keen to enlist your help to save the town before the rapacious Elite burn out the Genny. It’s not the deepest plot of all time, but it’s engrossing, and the terminal-based tech works really nicely. The terminals are also a really great way of communicating with the resistance without the need for endless excruciating encounters with actors – the city’s indigenous population is nominally locked down under a curfew. There are actors, but they won’t bother you too much unless you want them to, and you don’t need to worry that you’ll be dragged into endless stilted conversations.

Ultimately Absurd City can be whatever you want it to be: you can engage with the plot or you can avoid it to the point you can entirely skip the climax and head straight to the (planet-based) cafe and (ethical) gift shop at the end. But what it definitely is is a work of immersive theatre with real imagination and integrity. I certainly wouldn’t dwell too much on the fact it’s in Westfield: clearly the main reason it’s there is because the old KidZania site was such a boon. This isn’t just a gimmicky way to lure you to a shopping centre – it’s a destination in its own right.