Immersive theatre is at a point where it’s the lifeblood of any true Londoner, who is never happier than when running away from zombie hordes in an abandoned tunnel or… well, I can’t actually talk about You Me Bum Bum Train, but you get the idea.
And so all our eyes must now turn to Deptford, where a new immersive show is opening in June, one sure to set a new bar for the genre, with a good deal of intellectual engagement to go with the running around and screaming.
Storehouse is the name of the show and its setting is a huge warehouse in Deptford, which – without giving away spoilers – will be welcoming audiences into a world where humanity’s stories have been archived since 1983, the dawn of the internet. In this arena of information they will see they’re in a battle between Truth and Order, where the powerful manipulate the truth to their own ends and critical thinking must be applied to beat it. It is fair to see it touches upon the most important issues of our day.
Who is behind Storehouse?
Storehouse has been created by new arts production company Sage & Jester, whose founder is Liana Patarkatsishvili, a former TV executive from Georgia. Her experiences working in the media there and in Russia, directly led into this piece.
“It’s funny, because I think in many ways my life led me to this moment very logically,” she tells the Standard, “I was always so interested to explore how people make other people do things. How do you shape your messaging? How does the manipulation happen? Why do people listen to one type of leader and not the others?’
Patarkatsishvili saw first hand with her own family, how power tries to control truth and the consequences for those who try to show another side. Her father was the founder of a TV station in Georgia, which was taken over by the government.
“It was seized for political reasons because it was gaining too much popularity and was quite critical of the government’s actions,” she says, “And this was very much the reason that my dad prematurely died at the age of 52, suddenly of a heart attack.”
Her family fought for 17 years to get the station back, working their way through European and international courts, eventually emerging successfully with Patarkatsishvili as the head, but of course the experience showed her how important – and vulnerable – the media is.
“Especially if you look at the part of the world I come, it’s been so volatile., “ she says, “What’s happening in media information systems so quickly finds its reflection in politics and how people live their lives and whether or not countries start wars. I wanted to take that experience and turn into something useful.”
Storehouse
Storehouse
Three years ago she moved away from media and produced an art installation to make sense of the media struggles she had been through, and eventually met people in immersive theatre who suddenly helped her realised how she could bring her ideas to life in way that could also be beneficial for people:
“I realised my real passion was to actually create an experience in which one could not just look at someone else’s story, but walk through and create their own. An immersive, walk through theatre, big scale, real, not digital, where people connect, and made empathetically without telling people what to do. Just playfully engaging and saying, ‘don’t we all need a bit more critical thinking in life?’
When we are speaking about misinformation, you cannot put a member of the audience in place and tell them a story, talk at them. Because that’s another version of just creating a narrative. The only option that you have as a receiver is, do I buy into a story or not? But you don’t have any agency there. I think when we talk about misinformation it’s very important to make people feel seen and heard and that they’re part of this ecosystem.”
The nuts and bolts of bringing such an open-ended production sound difficult to say the least, with every scenario and decision tested as well as understanding the basics of what people want. “You have to think about the length of the show, the smoothness of transitions, and we want guests to feel like we are embracing them into the story, making them feel that we’ve been expecting them. They were just on the Tube, now they need to slow down and get into the story and we need to communicate that we’re very grateful for their time and attention.”
The actual rendering of the space and what people will encounter is under wraps right now, but you can expect an epic and surreal setting for the story’s themes to play out. Finding a place in which to situate things was tricky, says Patarkatsishvili, but Deptford Storehouse was like a gift, the size of two football pitches right on the river with a backdrop of Canary Wharf. The place used to be used to store paper for the newspapers, which she says was, “the cherry on top.”
Indeed there’s something about Storehouse that feels like the show is almost willing itself to be made, almost a required piece of theatre that our difficult times demand. You don’t have to look very far to recognise there’s a need for all of us to exercise our critical thinking muscles.
“Absolutely, exercising those muscles is exactly what it is,” says Patarkatsishvili, “We have such an overload. As soon as we open our eyes in the morning, we’re constantly bombarded with crazy amounts of information. But it is so far from actually being informed.
We need to be informed in order to make choices because this has such an impact on how we live our lives. How politics work, community, education, anything. So it feels very crucial to make sure that we get information of the quality that we deserve and not just what we’re just being given, just because the algorithm feeds us in a certain way.
We’re trying really to just fill that gap where to remind people, in a playful way, that while we are showered with information, it doesn’t mean that we’re informed. We deserve good quality information just like one deserves to have good quality food. We should be discriminating, making sure the information is nutritious.
How much of it you take away to your own life is up to you, but we provide the gym.”