ImmerseLDN

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...