Review: STOREHOUSE (Deptford Storehouse)

Review by Dan Sinclair

⭐️⭐️

You’ve most likely seen STOREHOUSE pop up on your social media feed by now, a mysterious immersive theatre show in the depths of Deptford, a place I will always misspell on Google Maps whilst trying to type it in a hurry. An epic production from brand-new company, Sage and Jester, a team made up of immersive dab-hands, they have taken over an abandoned warehouse to bring us a cautionary tale on misinformation. It’s big, it’s brave, and it’s a pain in the bum to get to, and with an important mission, can it deliver on both style and substance?

On January 1st 1983, the internet was invented (ish), and a team of four scientists came together to form STOREHOUSE, a physical database of all the content ever produced, stored as a series of physical 1’s and 0’s. This bunker is a time capsule in every way, remaining in its early 1980’s chique, and the STOREHOUSE works in a way far more digestible than the infinite hellscape of the internet. Data is bound by a team of dedicated bookbinders before being stored in the cloudy vaults. As we, visiting trustees of the STOREHOUSE arrive, the facility seems to be buckling under the weight of the end of days, politically and socially. Will the facility fall apart, or find a way to survive?

In its design, it is unlike anything you will ever see, both in scale and craftsmanship. Alice Helps’ production design is a marvel, the otherworldly bunker that is STOREHOUSE is simply put, beautiful. Waiting rooms, endless tunnels, workshops, forests, cloudy data storage facilities (oh, I get it, the cloud), each one is a remarkable design challenge, and she has delivered the highlight of the experience. Haunting lighting by Ben Donoghue complements every space perfectly and is, again, the word that best seems to suit the intentions of STOREHOUSE - epic.

Whilst the scale and design leave you utterly spellbound, as a bloke once said - the play’s the thing, and as a play, it is pretty poor. With 8 co-writers, it is confused and unsuccessful in its message, whatever that might be. The story of STOREHOUSE sits in the world of disinformation, how to combat it and how it affects our lives in often unnoticeable ways, but as a piece of theatre, it says remarkably little. What about the rise of fascism? Incels? Live-streamed mass-murder? An American civil war unfolding in front of us on TikTok live? Nothing. Instead, there were jokes about cat videos and WHAM!

STOREHOUSE lacks teeth, and all it manages to say is that disinformation is bad, and so is polarisation. And how do we combat this problem? Listen to each other and be nicer? Ask an anarchist, and I’m sure they’d give you a much more interesting and provocative answer. Ask a team working with a multi million pound pot, and you will get this answer. The team is composed of immersive theatre pros, yet this side of the experience also falls short, with long sections consisting of standing and listening to the actors, or interactive moments that are as advanced as listening to a mp3 file and writing down what you heard. It’s just not that much fun to be honest.

And an aside - not a spoiler - but for those who’ve seen it, why did the scientists die of old age if they had eternal life inside the facility?

STOREHOUSE whips around multiple performances on each night, so I can only speak to the performers I caught on my visit, but it is clearly a team of wonderful performers. As we sip on a glass of long island iced tea, we clatter into Smithy, played by the delightful Nat Kennedy. As one of the caretakers at the facility, they are running around with a walkie-talkie, trying to plug holes in the background. They are also the heart of this story and were honestly a treat every time they popped up. In their various roles, Chris Agha, Elizabeth Hollingshead and Rob Leetham were charming and faultless.

As STOREHOUSE starts to wrap up, we ascend to a platform high up in the warehouse, and it is magical. For the first time, you can see the true scale of what they have created here, beautifully lit up by Ben Donoghue and with a composition from Anna Meredith, it is an epic conclusion. Mixed into the song in a feat of lightning fast sound editing are ending quotes from us, the audience, the content creators. ‘Talk to your neighbours, love is the answer, delete chat GPT’, but again, if the profound conclusion of the show is just what happens to have been said that night, then what are the team actually saying?

It’s hard to point to what’s gone wrong; a talented writing team run by the whip-smart Donnacadh O’Briain seems to have landed on a piece that still feels like a first draft. There’s the sense that everyone involved feels like they’ve changed the world with STOREHOUSE. With its multi million pound budget (likely enough to lavishly fund every single London pub theatre production for the next decade and then some), it is poor. And when compared to the endless creativity and fantastic art produced by shows that don’t have this financial luxury (I’m looking at you, Vegetables by Muddled Marauders!), it is depressing. 

Art lives from constraints, and dies from freedom. Though that doesn’t mean you have to freeze in an attic with a cigarette and a bottle of absinthe. I’m sure there’s a happy medium somewhere.

STOREHOUSE is playing at the Deptford Storehouse until 20th September.

Tickets from: https://sageandjester.com/whats-on/

Photos by Helen Murray