Review: Wake The Tiger's Absurd City
Wake The Tiger's mammoth free-roaming immersive art experience is the best attraction to open in London this year.
Photo: Andre Pattenden
Tucked away in the far corner of Westfield London, wedged in between Marks & Spencer and MANGO, sits the entrance to Absurd City, the latest self-guided immersive art experience from Wake The Tiger. Set across a staggering 80,000 sq ft venue formerly occupied by Kidzania, the experience invites guests to become 'daytrippers' and explore every nook and cranny of the city's five distinct and highly detailed districts to their heart's content.
Anyone who's attended Wake The Tiger's original Bristol venue, Dream Factory, will know that exploring everything on offer is no small feat. Absurd City's maze of corridors, passageways, businesses and hidden rooms is packed full of inventive interactive elements, dazzling installations and some of the most creative design choices we've ever seen in an immersive production.
If wandering around Absurd City and trying to take everything in wasn't already enough to fill up several hours of your time, the experience's overarching narrative, which examines and satirises consumerism, overconsumption, and humanity's response to the climate crisis, gives daytrippers even more to discover.
It balances being clear enough for those who want to treat Absurd City as a supercharged Instagram backdrop while also providing daytrippers who want to dive deeper with a rich, fleshed-out narrative that's packed full of lore about the city's past, present and future.
Photo: Andre Pattenden
Upon entering Absurd City, daytrippers emerge from an interdimensional portal into Bloom Street, the hyper-commercialised retail district. Every spare bit of wall space is covered with billboards advertising nonsensical products and questionable investment opportunities. Shop windows proudly display items like single-use T-shirts and pre-loaded disposable cameras, while the district's various businesses try to keep residents medicated up to their eyeballs and spending in equal measure.
Despite the Absurd City representatives in Bloom Street repeatedly declaring, ‘Everything is fine!' things couldn’t be further from the truth. Citywide power cuts, which plunge the entire city into momentary darkness, are plaguing the domed metropolis, and a grassroots movement spearheaded by the Wunderground is pushing back against the utopian narrative that the city's elite are presenting to visitors.
At the centre of the unrest is REX, the adorable canine avatar who’s been tasked with managing the distribution of power across Absurd City and acts as something of a tour guide for daytrippers while its residents are locked away under curfew.
While Bloom Street sells the utopian image of Absurd City, the other districts tell a different story. The waste-processing district, Reclamia, has been forced to upcycle discarded items to build their home, which is largely made up of scrap metal and obsolete technology.
Imaginopolis, the home base for Absurd City's artists and free-thinkers, rebels against the establishment by creating maximalist work that imagines a better and brighter future for citizens. Meanwhile, residents of the cyberpunk-infused NEO/NEXUS district are attempting to biohack their way into generating their own power behind the Elite's back in their nearby sleek headquarters-cum-gated community.
Photo: Andre Pattenden
Absurd City's daytrippers are free to engage with the experience's overarching narrative as much or as little as they like. There's a small cast of performers roaming around Absurd City, either as hired hands for the Elite, working to keep up appearances, or as undercover Wunderground members who present themselves as fellow daytrippers and try to recruit visitors to join their cause. Both gently guide visitors towards investigating the Wunderground's hidden outposts, which are tucked away off the beaten track in every district.
Inside these outposts, repurposed ATMs serve as the main form of communication between daytrippers and Absurd City's defiant residents. By engaging with the outposts in each district and countless small clues scattered throughout the city, guests will slowly piece together the situation surrounding REX's role in maintaining the uneven status quo and how they can help save the city. Their efforts culminate in the experience's finale, in which they're taken into the control room of the Genny - the city's central power source.
It's by no means the most exhaustive narrative we've ever come across in an immersive experience, and it equates to roughly the same amount of work as one trail at Phantom Peak takes to complete, but it's an effective way of encouraging curious daytrippers to dive deeper into the world and question the story being presented by those in power, and its themes mirror a lot of the real-life problems we're currently facing down here on Earth.
Photo: Andre Pattenden
Throughout all five districts, there are countless interactive elements that daytrippers can engage with. While some, such as an Elite HQ computer which can be hacked into and the NEO/NEXUS server room (which is just begging to be infected with a virus), feed directly into Absurd City's overarching narrative, there are many more that exist purely to entertain.
The consumeristic arcade game Completely Trolleyed, which challenges players to steer a mounted shopping trolley around a virtual supermarket and scan items with a barcode reader, and the dog-walking simulator Walkies, which is controlled by moving a heavy-duty metal dog chain, are a huge amount of fun and feel reminiscent of the eccentric work on display at Tim Hunkin's Novelty Automation and Southwold Pier venue.
Look a little closer as you explore, and you'll find an unwinnable claw machine full of eggs inside Bloom Street's Cutting Corners Shop, an extensive CCTV network which guests can use to spy on the city's various factions going about their daily lives, a huge hairdryer in Imaginopolis that causes far-off metallic pinwheels to spin, and a wonderful interactive cabaret show inside its own theatre that responds to the volume of audience applause, to name just a few.
Photo: Andre Pattenden
As an experience that comments on the climate crisis and our negative impact on the world, every part of Absurd City has been created with those ideas at the forefront. Much of the material used to create the various installations and districts comes from salvaged materials and has been upcycled for the experience, reflecting Wake The Tiger's commitment to operating as sustainably and ethically as possible.
Although Absurd City is a drastic departure from Kidzania, the site's former tenants and much of the infrastructure left behind after they vacated the site have also been repurposed. This includes the British Airways fuselage that's been incorporated into the NEO/NEXUS district and also serves as a centrepiece of the experience's airport-themed lobby, and the layout of the venue's first floor, which largely carries over unchanged - albeit highly re-themed.
More than 90% of the items in Absurd City's gift shop have been ethically sourced, with a heavy focus being placed on having independent businesses as suppliers, and the shop is entirely free of single-use plastic. Wake The Tiger has also partnered with Oxfam to source T-shirts that can be given a new lease of life as merchandise.
The paint-splattered on-site bar, which is themed around the Wunderground, has a plant-based menu and has a range of drinks made sustainably, including beers that have been made from surplus loaves of bread instead of barley.
Photo: Andre Pattenden
Overall, Wake The Tiger's Absurd City is easily the best new attraction to open in London this year. The sheer scale of the project is remarkable, but it's the creativity packed into every corner of its 80,000 sq ft footprint that makes it so impressive.
The amount of work that has gone into creating Absurd City is genuinely mind-boggling, but the result is a one-of-a-kind experience that's unrivalled anywhere else in the UK.
★★★★★
[Tickets gifted in exchange for an honest review]
Wake The Tiger's Absurd City is open daily at Westfield London near Shepherd's Bush and White City stations. For more information and to book tickets, visit wakethetiger.com
