The Film Shed

Immersive dining gurus Gingerline were a major cultural force in London throughout the ’10s but seemingly vanished during the pandemic. As it turns out, the company – the brainchild of producers Suz Mountford and Kerry Adamson – had relocated to Asia for a stretch and simply chosen not to bang on about it to folks back home. Now they’re back, and it’s very much as if they’d never been away: ‘The Grand Expedition’ is literally a remount of their last full show.  A reworked one, mind. The conceit behind the Laura Partridge-directed piece is that we (the audience) are Phileas Fogg-style Victorian explorers, travelling the globe by hot air balloon. The ‘tour’ is to the countries our wind-blown dirigibles land in – which we then sample the cuisines of. It’s a flexible idea: this incarnation of the show simply visits different countries to the original one.  Spoilering the menu or locations visited is frowned upon, but in essence we sit in our balloon gondolas (stylised tables of six) and proceed to ‘travel the world’, which we do via Fred Campbell’s gorgeous projected animations that wrap around the walls of the large room the show takes place in. It’s probably fine to reveal that we start off in London, but it’s very much not our London; rather a twinkling fantasy of an idyllic mediaeval-slash-Victorian city, surrounded by mountains and monoliths. Campbell’s illustrations – beautifully animated by Greenaway & Greenaway – are definitely the show’s most delightful aspect. When our