Review: STOREHOUSE by Sage & Jester

This large-scale immersive show from Sage & Jester is visually stunning but buckles under the weight of its narrative shortcomings.

Photo: Helen Murray

In a cavernous warehouse on the bank of the River Thames in Deptford sits STOREHOUSE, the debut immersive promenade show from Sage & Jester. Anyone who's even mildly invested in London's immersive scene will have seen mention of the show over the last few months, with the company having hosted an extensive pre-show campaign, which included a roaming pop-up experience in the form of STOREHOUSE Truck, a string of events at The Pleasance in North London featuring conversations with the likes of Rachel Parris and Jamie Bartlett, and heaps of marketing on both social media and tube posters across the city.

If London's immersive scene had been waiting for a new blockbuster production during Punchdrunk's downtime following The Burnt City and Viola's Room, STOREHOUSE, at first, appeared to be it.

When first announced, it was pitched as 'one of the UK's most artistically daring and large-scale immersive theatre shows'. With a creative team made up of some heavyweight names, including Sophie Larsmon, Donnacadh O'Brian, and Caro Murphy, STOREHOUSE arrived with significant pedigree. Sage & Jester founder Liana Patarkatsishvili also has first-hand experience of the impact those in power can wield through disinformation after IMEDIA, an independent television station in Georgia, which was founded by her father, was seized by the Georgian government and used to broadcast fake news in 2010. Ahead of opening, all signs pointed to this show looking to tackle misinformation with a nuanced take from lived experience.

Sadly, despite STOREHOUSE having some exceptionally beautiful spaces that are as detailed as they are huge, the show's narrative seems to have nothing new to say about the digital age, the impact of misinformation on everyday people, and our ability to fight against it.

Photo: Helen Murray

Within the world of the show, STOREHOUSE was founded in 1983 with a clear mission: to catalogue and archive every piece of information ever shared online and assign it a numerical value based on the quality. While the overall quality of the world's online posts has taken a dive since the creation of social media, all of this work was nonetheless in aid of something, 'The Great Aggregation', a seismic event due to have taken place on 1st January 2025 and provide a universal truth for all of humanity. It'll come as no surprise that The Great Aggregation never materialised, and as one of the show's characters put it, the whole thing was an 'epic fail'.

While the facility was seemingly chugging along fine throughout the 90s and 00s, the workers at STOREHOUSE, who are made up of caretakers, book binders and stackers, have been struggling to keep up with the workload in recent years thanks to the explosion of social media. On top of that, the place is beginning to fall apart under the pressure. Ink is leaking from the ceilings, books are growing mouldy and covered in strange Rorschach test-like spots, and the walls of the facility have started to emit ominous whispers.

In an attempt to get STOREHOUSE back on track amid declining staff morale, a recruitment drive is underway, and the audience, acting as new trustees, are invited to tour the facility to learn more about the work that's been done on-site for the last 40 years.

Photo: Helen Murray

The scale of STOREHOUSE is pretty staggering and easily dwarfs any other immersive production in recent memory. It's a positive step for London's immersive scene to have another company creating work at the scale often reserved for the likes of Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk, and while each group of audience members will only experience around 1/4 of the venue over their 90-minute experience, every square foot of Deptford Storehouse's gargantuan footprint has been put to use, with four builds of the main show space filling the building.

Alice Help's production design, which is far and away the best part of STOREHOUSE, rivals that of The Burnt City when it comes to the kind of small details immersive fans lap up. Handwritten notes are scattered throughout the book binders' room alongside a host of 80s tech and period-accurate paraphernalia; the whispering stacks - complete with their shrines for daily worship - are akin to a cathedral made of sheep's wool and towers over audiences, while the willow stacks, which have been crafted and shaped using real willow, feel like stepping inside a vast, multi-layered woodland den. Underfoot, you find natural material like bark and sand, which adds further tactility to spaces already drenched in unique, organic materials.

Photo: Helen Murray

Coupled with some wonderfully responsive lighting design from Ben Donoghue, the show offers up the chance to explore and interact with spaces that are on a scale rarely seen within an immersive show. The exceptional design on display in all of STOREHOUSE's spaces creates an otherworldly, magical feeling that stands alongside Viola's Room in terms of evoking the senses, even if it easily eclipses Punchdrunk's recent offering in terms of scope.

The final moments of STOREHOUSE see audiences ascend above the ground floor level they've spent so much of the show exploring to reveal the true scale of the production. It's so big you can barely make out the other end of the building, and looking across the entirety of Deptford Storehouse from above, it's immediately clear just how much care and attention has gone into building this world and how big a cheque it must have required to create.

Photo: Helen Murray

On the flip side, the story STOREHOUSE offers to audiences is deeply underbaked. There's a huge focus on the inner workings of the fictional facility, which is occupied by one-dimensional characters who don't seem to have any interest in the nuance of such pressing ideas as fake news, misinformation, propaganda and deep fakes. There's passing mention given to real-world examples of police brutality and racial injustice courtesy of stacker Rami (Scott Karim), and bookbinder Andie (Dawn Butler) shares a story of their big break in the art world never materialising due to cancel culture, but as soon as they begin to approach how these events impacted them on a personal level, they're interrupted by either a blaring alarm or another STOREHOUSE worker, who swiftly changes the subject.

Those trying to keep up with the storyline of STOREHOUSE will find themselves bogged down in lengthy monologues that are pure exposition, covering in detail the inter-departmental politics of the facility. There's no mention of why governments, or those in power, would want to deploy misinformation and fake news, the impact it has on communities and everyday people, and how it's shaped our online spaces.

Photo: Helen Murray

With the show offering a frustratingly simplistic opinion on some of the biggest issues of our time, it's a surprise that Liana's Patarkatsishvili first-hand experience with these issues doesn't seem to have influenced the writing at all, with the story being told in STOREHOUSE failing to show the personal impact such campaigns have on everyday people.

Before Sage & Jester launched, much of the company's creative team, including Liana Patarkatsishvili, operated under the banner of Medea. At last year's Edinburgh Fringe, they presented an audio experience called Illuminated Lies, which was made up of voice recordings from individuals who have been personally affected by misinformation and fake news. Less than a year later, and with a space infinitely bigger than the back of the black cab in which Illuminated Lies took place, to see the fallout and real-world consequences that these misinformation campaigns can have on individuals be completely absent from STOREHOUSE feels like both a step backwards and a glaring omission.

Photo: Helen Murray

In terms of interactivity, STOREHOUSE also offers very little for audiences to do and next to no way in which to influence the events that unfold during the show. There are a couple of small fetch quests in which audiences either search the space for postcards, listen to and note down the whispers coming from the walls, or try to match Rorschach-like ink spots from within the pages of bound books. There's a more substantial chance for trustees to try their hand at being stackers, which is soundtracked by Bucks Fizz's Making Your Mind Up, and involves running around the willow-lined stacks, but beyond that and some light interaction answering broad questions like 'What changes would you implement to STOREHOUSE?' and 'What inspires hope?', the audience are largely passive throughout.

The combination of this light interaction with the underdeveloped story completely removes any emotional investment in the story on display throughout STOREHOUSE and makes the later revelations in the show's finale void of any real stakes. What should be a rousing call to arms, with audiences ready to get on board with the idea of dismantling the systems deployed by those in power, instead receives a muted response from most of the crowd.

While the narrative of STOREHOUSE diminishes the impact of the overall experience, there's a lot to enjoy in experiencing the show's vast size and rich attention to detail. With a huge budget and an even bigger venue, this is immersive theatre on the grandest possible scale, and we should try to savour it when it so rarely comes along, shortcomings and all.

★★★

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STOREHOUSE runs until 20th September at Deptford Storehouse. Tickets are priced from £37.50. For more information and to book tickets, visit sageandjester.com

For more reviews of immersive experiences like STOREHOUSE, check out our recent Reviews.