Cleopatra: The Experience

There is a sober spine of historical fact just about propping up this cheerily lurid new immersive exhibition. Much as Cleopatra: The Experience is jam-packed with fanciful CGI, information panels do repeatedly acknowledge that we know relatively little about the life of the last and most famous of the queens of Egypt. 

Obviously, we do know a fair amount. She ruled the country after deposing her brother-slash-husband (it was a thing then!) Ptolemy XIV. She then shrewdly hooked up with Julius Caesar, correctly reasoning that rising power Rome could protect Egypt, before less shrewdly hooked up with his co-successor Mark Antony – not a bad idea per se, but she backed the wrong horse in the struggle for control of Rome. But, the displays point out, much of our current received wisdom about Cleopatra is basically just salacious gossip dreamed up by Roman historians in the centuries after her death.

There is an awful lot of fairly mind-boggling digital spectacle

But what this latest immersive touring show from MAD – Spanish purveyors of This Sort Of Thing – has the courage to do is say ‘no, Cleopatra almost certainly didn’t kill herself with an asp. But what if we nonetheless showed you a VR CGI film of her getting menaced by a gigantic asp in the afterlife? What about that, eh?’

There is an awful lot of fairly mind-boggling digital spectacle in Cleopatra, which I should point out is fairly cagey about describing itself as an ‘exhibition’. And with a team of over 80 artists and animators working on it for two years, it's a decent spectacle all things considered, with some genuinely pretty breathtaking moments (I’d toss in a small trigger warning for vertigo sufferers).

And if you only hitherto relied upon Plutarchan tittle tattle for your knowledge of Cleo’s life and times, it’s actually fairly informative: the fact that she was from a Greek dynasty put in place by Alexander the Great’s conquests is, I think, genuinely not that widely understood.

However, there’s simply no denying the fact that the heart of the exhibition lies in the bonkers CGI stuff, which often flies in literal contradiction to what the factual bits have said (‘Cleopatra didn’t bathe in donkey milk… but here’s what it would look like if she did!’). Fantastical evocations of Ptolemaic Egypt, its mythology, and miscellaneous woo-woo stuff – like Alexander being handed the kingdom by a glowing-eyed deity – make for an impressive if frequently somewhat silly spectacle.

As with MAD’s previous Tutankhamen and Pompeii exhibitions, there’s a formula at play: a VR walkthrough bit, a sit-down VR bit, a big room playing a massive looping film taking us through Cleopatra’s life and times in fairly insane fashion. All this tech makes it a lot more fun for younger audiences than a trip to the British Museum, and it would be fairly miserable to bemoan its various embellishments when they’re clearly there for fun first and foremost. And much as I hate myself for saying this, if you have children with fairly basic tastes and are worried it’s all going to be about Cleopatra’s beauty routine (I’m dancing around the word ‘girly’ here) then really don’t worry about that: it is just as bombastic as its predecessors.

But there is a tension between its educational and entertainment side, and really the format of these shows would be at least as well suited to a fictional subject as a real one: Robin Hood, or Noah’s Ark, or Star Wars, say. Still, so long as you go in with a broad and inquisitive mind, you should both learn something and appreciate the computer-generated sturm und drang.