Review: The Shop for Mortals and All Fools at COLAB Tower

Lush design and a tour de force performance combine for an intimate take on The Bacchae.

Photo: James Lawson

The Shop for Mortals and All Fools opens its doors once again to venturous audiences keen to explore its mystical antiquities. By now, word of Vinicius Salles’s take on The Bacchae has spread from its mesmerizing sold-out run at Stanley Arts to the ears of immersive fans across the country. This new installation at COLAB Tower offers an intimate opportunity to dive into the Dionysian fervor for those who may have missed out on the original iteration.

Set in a mysterious shop seemingly trapped outside of space and time, audiences are greeted with an impressive array of curios and antiques. The shopkeeper, Agatha (Emma Kirrage), encourages us to explore a number of decorative boxes which likely hide a secret about the true nature of the shop. Each box comes with a cryptic and poetic description of its history and use.

While this introduction is an engaging invitation into the world of the play, it unfortunately isn’t given enough time. Due to the constraints of the running time and the low lighting of the venue, audiences will only have time to explore a box or two before being whisked away to the back of the shop. It’s empowering for an audience to be given an active role within the world, and we are promised that role will be of use at a later period in the show, but our role (and our agency within the show) is quickly abandoned for a more linear theatrical experience.

What we are given in return is a tour de force performance. Audiences are invited into Agatha’s personal quarters in the back of the shop, where a table and several sofas and chests of drawers are overgrown with unnatural foliage bursting from unexpected places. Agatha takes on the singular role of storyteller, recounting the strange twists of her fate as a member of a hedonistic cult, and we are swept up in the whirlwind of her frenzied, orgiastic memories.

Photo: James Lawson

With the boon of recent adaptations of The Bacchae (including Sleepwalk Immersive’s Bacchanalia and the National Theatre’s The Bacchae), audiences will likely already be familiar with Agatha’s story of lust and loss. This production takes a more focused look at Agave (updated here to Agatha for a more modern audience), the tragic victim of Dionysus’s power struggle to be recognized as a god.

It’s clear from the outset that Agatha is an unreliable narrator, and her hazy memories of parties, battles, and orgies are often told through movement, poetic monologue, and artistic imagery rather than solid facts. This approach adds to the frenzied dreamlike daze of Agatha’s experience, fueling the story through emotion rather than logic.

But if ever there was a performer to cinch such a complex emotional storyline together, it’s Emma Kirrage. Deftly flitting between fragile humility and wicked abandon, Kirrage gives an intoxicating performance that combines brutal and graceful physicality, deep emotional range, and expert storytelling. It’s an unforgettable performance from a world-class performer.

The set design (Bronia Kupczyk with pieces from Elina Pasok and Anita Wadsworth) is equally enthralling. A multisensory experience, the space constantly confronts the familiar with the eerie. Trees grow from inside dresser drawers, vines twist to form a voluptuous female bust, fabric wraps around chairs like dismembered limbs – all combining to create an ethereal liminal space haunted by the events of the past.

There is a clear Punchdrunk influence across the experience (which is unsurprising given director Vincisius Salles’s time working with the company), and this production has capitalized on some of the best aspects of Punchdrunk’s work. At its best moments, The Shop for Mortals and All Fools captures the pervasive doom and majestic scope of productions like Sleep No More. It comes through in the otherworldly choreography, the clever use of stagecraft in repurposing props to shift the audience’s frame of reference, and the use of scent to evoke emotional responses to space.

However, the show inherits Punchdrunk’s attitude towards agency as well. Audiences are only directly addressed at key moments, wherein they are given tea to hold to increase a sensory experience or are spoken to directly as an aside of Agatha’s monologue. But for the majority of the experience, the audience is simply that – audience.

While there is nothing wrong with passive observation (audiences have been sitting in seats at theatres for centuries without an active role in shows, and it’s worked just fine), it does limit the show’s ability to truly immerse the audience in the world of the show. If the world is not reacting to the audience’s presence and input in the immediate environment, then are they really there?

Photo: James Lawson

That’s not to say the show props itself up on Punchdrunk’s style – quite the opposite. The Shop for Mortals and All Fools has more than enough personality and innovation to set it apart from other reference points, and makes a statement in its own right about its unique approach to theatre.

The captivating performance of its leading lady, the unique and intriguing element of an actual storefront (with trinkets available for purchase; all proceeds go to the show’s partner charity, Emmaus), and the impressive and effective simplicity of the stagecraft set the show apart.

The production closes with a return to the storefront. Given what they now know about the gods and her own experience, Agatha asks audience members to select which box in the shop holds a secret to the truth behind the shop. One lucky audience member is selected, both through intuition and fate, to have a private one-on-one with Agatha, stealing away once more to the back room of the shop.

The sudden return of agency is an effective transition back to the real world waiting outside the shop’s doors, but the mechanic of challenging audiences’ understanding of the content at the beginning of the show seems disconnected from the central theme of the overall experience. Still, the promise of an intimate and personalized experience is a tempting one, and any excuse to experience more of Kirrage’s spellbinding performance is a welcome one.

The Shop for Mortals and All Fools is an intimate and at times powerful adaptation of Euripides’s masterpiece. While it may not be the most immersive offering, the outstanding performances and inventive set design make it an unforgettable experience nonetheless.

Tickets are currently available through the beginning of July, meaning the store may close its doors again soon, but here’s hoping it will appear again soon for audiences to explore the curious trinkets and the stories behind them for themselves.

★★★★

[Tickets provided in exchange for an honest review]

Words: Danny Romeo

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The Shop for Mortals and All Fools runs at COLAB Tower near London Bridge until 4th July 2026. Tickets are priced from £35.00 per person. For more information and to book tickets, visit viniciussalles.co.uk