Review: Storehouse, Deptford Storehouse

Toby Jones! Meera Syal! Kathryn Hunter! Billy Howle! Immersive theatre! With a cast like that, can new company Sage & Jester hope to rival the immersive success of Punchdrunk and Colab?

The show takes place in Deptford Storehouse, a vast 9000 square metre open plan space set among a surprisingly large area of waste land in south-east London. On arrival you’re assigned a lanyard with a number on it, which separates the audience into eight small units before you’re led to your induction space. Here, it’s explained, you’ve become a trustee of a top-secret “Arkive” which has been cataloguing the world’s data – all of it – since 1983. You’re here to witness the Great Aggregation, which was due to reveal a “universal everlasting truth for humanity”.

The induction takes place in a small hexagonal room, where you take your photo on an iPad which then prints your ID, attached to your lanyard. Fortified by a glass of “liminal tea” cocktail (non-alcoholic version available), you then pledge allegiance to the Arkive before being called upon to investigate why the Great Aggregation has, for unknown reasons, failed to take place.

To further your researches you’re led through corridors made of newsprint rolls to the Bookbinder room, another hexagonal space filled with ancient printing equipment. It’s full of props and meticulous detail, and is fun to explore. A chute dispenses paper filled with random numbers, as the bookbinder explains how the data is translated into binary and then printed out before being bound into volumes. A source of consternation is the ink that’s leaking through the ceiling.

From there you move to the Stacks, a series of rooms whose walls are seemingly made of cotton wool. Here, too, the attention to detail is painstaking: niches around the room hold the volumes, each of which is individually designed with a binary title on its spine. 

But the Arkive is falling apart. A store cupboard has morphed into a room and adjacent corridors made of interweaved willow, on whose walls the books are gradually decaying. The staff, who have been there since the beginning – for an unknown reason, they don’t age in this underground facility – explain that the real problem is the amount of misinformation plaguing the internet, promoting hateful lies and fomenting anger through deliberate statistical misuse.

Alice Helps‘ room sets are glorious, intricately built and full of surprises, from the book-encased one-arm bandits that generate three-word phrases to the hundreds of custom-built wifi-controlled lamps that you take on your travels. Culminating in a walkway that reveals the entire vast space from above, the show is big on spectacle. There are moments of humour, such as the mandatory breaks where the staff have to dance to a recording of Karma Chameleon (well, the Arkive was supposedly inaugurated in 1983). 

The trouble is that while it’s gorgeous to look at, Storehouse is low on content. The initial premise – that somehow converting information into binary, printing it out and binding it into books will somehow reveal a greater truth – is patently nonsensical. And when truths do begin to emerge, they’re little more than vacuous platitudes.

Since the audience has to spend a fair amount of time in each room in order to stretch the show to 90 minutes, something has to take place in each location. A “staff member” guides you through the purpose of the bookbinding and stack rooms, but they seem to run out of relevant information and rely on autobiographical details that bear no relation to the story.

And what of Jones, Hunter, Syal and Howle? They don’t appear, of course, as their input was to provide voiceovers. Except there’s precious little of this: I discerned two short sentences narrated by Toby Jones, but was unable to identify the whispered statements by any of the others.

Storehouse is the brainchild of creator Liana Patarkatsishvili, who self-funded the show. The daughter of Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili, she has clearly spent a fortune on a vanity project that’s big on spectacle but light on intellectual content. With so much invested in the set, it’s a shame more thought wasn’t put into its incoherent, lightweight string of aphorisms and schoolboy philosophy. Go to see it for the set, but don’t expect any dramatic revelations.

Founder and Concept Creator: Liana Patarkatsishvili
Producer: Sage & Jester
Executive Producer: Zoe Snow
Creative Director: Sophie Larsmon
Lead Producer: Rosalyn Newbery
Production Designer: Alice Helps
Costume Designer: Julie Belinda Landau
Sound Designer: Julie Belinda Landau
Original Compositions: Sinemis Buyuka and James Bulley
Lighting Designer: Ben Donoghue
Dramaturgy: Sophie Drake
Story Producer: Donnacadh O’Briain

Storehouse plays at Deptford Storehouse until 20 September.