In 1983, the year the internet was created, a doomsday cult of nerds decided to create a repository for every web page ever created. These would be printed out in binary, put into bound editions, and then fed to a weird network of fluffy fungi, with the understanding that on January 1 2025 some sort of rapture would be achieved out of all this data. Unfortunately it didn’t happen – a non event described as ‘the epic fail’ – possibly because the system was being poisoned by the toxic levels of fake news now poisoning the web. But maybe YOU can help..?
As far as I can make out from actually having seen it, that's the basic premise behind new immersive theatre company Sage & Jester’s inaugural show Storehouse, which I think is worth sharing because beyond ‘it’s an immersive theatre show’ it was pretty unclear what was actually involved on the basis of the advance publicity.
Unfortunately Storehouse is also absolute nonsense, a pretty but torpid vanity project that’s the brainchild of businesswoman Liana Patarkatsishvili, who I assume also bankrolled this expensive show, staged in a gargantuan Deptford warehouse.
Patarkatsishvili – daughter of the late Georgian billionaire and media mogul Badri Patarkatsishvili – is clearly concerned with ‘misinformation’: last year she funded an art installation in Edinburgh called Illuminated Lies on the same subject. Which is fine but simply lobbing money at an idea you care about doesn’t inherently make for great art, even with talented personnel like creative director Sophie Larsmon on board (she’s worked on numerous great projects, from Secret Cinema to the 2012 Olympics victory ceremonies). A decent writing team of Katie Lyons, Tristan Bernays and Sonali Bhattacharyya seem wholly frittered on the wishy washy script.
If you disengage your brain then Storehouse is a modestly humorous show about a group of eccentric scientists who have been stuck in the Storehouse going quietly mad since 1983, listening to the same New Romantic bangers and failing to age due to some quality of the book mushrooms. However, I often struggled to work out exactly what was going on and certainly I had very little idea who the hell a pre-recorded celebrity voice cast that included Toby Jones, Kathryn Hunter and Meerya Syal were meant to be.
But the rooms we’re taken through on our (fairly linear) journey to solve the Storehouse’s ills are uniformly impressive, especially the fungal chambers and the last scene in which we finally see the giant span of the entire massive Deptford building, which vaguely recalls the opening of Brazil or the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I’m aware that to some immersive theatre fans, ‘walking through pretty rooms’ is basically the point of the genre, and if Storehouse is relatively modest in scale compared to a full sized Punchdrunk show, it undoubtedly involves several very pretty rooms.
But as storytelling with a message, the whole thing feels needlessly tortuous, bordering on patronising. Why construct a convoluted allegory for something (‘online misinformation is a problem’) that the likely audience surely agrees with already? And if they don’t, I’m not sure crowbarring it into a twee metaphor is going to change their minds.
It’s not an engrossing story, and I didn’t even slightly care about any of the characters or their weird mushroom internet cult. I noted with some exasperation that beyond the cult’s preposterously utopian belief in the possibilities of the internet, there wasn’t even really a balancing nod to the idea that online information could be useful.
Above all it struck me that if Patarkatsishvii’s show was inspired by the fate of her dad’s TV and radio company (which lost independence when the Georgian government took it over after his death) then… well, okay, that’s ‘oligarch-world problems’ but at the same time it’s a more interesting story than what we get here. Why not tell it, or something closer to it, rather than this mismatched cocktail of bumbling whimsy and aggressive moralising?
There is potential in Sage & Jester: a massive space, talented creatives, and presumably a lot of money. If this isn’t just a one off vanity project, better days may lie ahead. But it’s not misinformation to say that Storehouse is a very ropey start.
