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If you ever wanted to film a profoundly depressing alternative opener to ‘Love, Actually’, a self-storage unit would be a great place to set it. While Richard Curtis’s schmaltziest romance was inspired by the soppy greetings in an airport arrivals lounge, a self-storage unit speaks of partings at their most painful: sad collections of unfulfilled objects in soulless rooms.
Dante or Die’s site-specific performance charts the emotional highs and (mostly) lows in a woman’s life. The audience traipses through a fully operational branch of Urban Locker, whose identikit units and yellow-doored corridors have been decked out with junk and trinkets to conjure up three decades of visits.
Daphna Attias’s direction keeps the audience moving with the purposeful efficiency of a trek through Ikea, piling on household junk and emotional baggage as we progress from 1988 to the present day. But it can’t hide the cringe-worthy clunkiness of Chloe Moss’s script, which loses the pathos of Zoe’s story in an unstructured, muddled set of scenes. The ensemble cast ham up their thinly-written parts like movie romcom characters as they embark on a set of predictable partings, break-ups, marriages and emotional moments. And the unpredictable moments are best forgotten: like the ‘90s rave scene where Zoe appears to get pregnant by Donnie Darko’s clean-living cousin.
We barely touch upon the big questions, like why we’ll get tearily sentimental over a child’s drawing or a mixtape or a sheaf of love letters. And the weird chirpiness of the piece’s tone, relentlessly soundtracked with cheesy pop hits, makes it feel oddly like an advert for self-storage. Zoe must have paid enough in rental fees over the decades to buy a semi in Chippenden, but the emotional or financial damage of hanging on to stuff is hardly felt. Underneath its cheery packaging, Zoe’s story is as flimsy as a secondhand cardboard storage box.