STOREHOUSE

Deptford Storehouse

★★★½

“a multifaceted and engaging experience”

In a Deptford warehouse that was once the paper store for London’s newspaper industry, Storehouse (created by Liana Patarkatsishvili) is an immersive theatre production that questions the role of the internet and the twenty-four-hour news cycle in shaping our reality and the changing relationship between facts, news, and opinion.

The journey begins outside with a glass of sparkling wine and a paper guide that explains the premise: in 1983, at the birth of the internet, a group of visionaries opened the Storehouse, intending to convert all human data into binary code and which could then be catalogued, with the intention of collating it all on the First of January 2025. This moment, termed the Great Aggregation, would lead to the discovery of a universal, liberatory truth. We enter after the failure of this project.

Sorted into rooms to begin the experience, we are tasked with helping the employees of Storehouse – who have not left since 1983 – resolve the issue and proceed with the Great Aggregation. Passing through the doors into the cavernous warehouse we enter a low, cool space punctuated with columns, and from there into a waiting room. From this point onwards the performance incorporates everything from oaths and discussions to fortune cookies and votes, creating a multifaceted and engaging experience.

The actors we encounter along the way are all excellent. Fully embracing the retro 1980s environment, they walk us through the Storehouse’s collection, assessment and shelving processes while sharing their backstories and professional grievances – and dancing to Karma Chameleon whenever it plays over the Tannoy. Special mention goes to the Zachary Pang who guided our group through the maze of the Storehouse with aplomb. They are supported by a stellar cast of voice actors, that appear in video or audio: Toby Jones, Meera Syal, Kathryn Hunter and Billy Howle.

The sprawling staging (production designer Alice Helps), littered with 80s technology, and overgrown with a mossy, fungal-like substance, transports the audience to a strange – but strangely familiar – world, even down to the level of smells which permeate the rooms, bringing us further into the experience. The clothes (Julie Belinda Landau) are also fantastic, all silk shirts, braces and big shoulder pads, conjuring a moment of time frozen from the recent past.

Without wanting to give too much away, as I think going in cold enhances the experience, the structure of the show reflects its content, with participants invited to interact with one another, before, during and after the performance. There are multiple moments for a complementary drink, and I can say that the non-alcoholic cocktails are amazing. Conversation between strangers is encouraged: ‘a friend may be waiting behind a stranger’s face’, as we try together to understand our contemporary reality.

While I felt that the message was not groundbreaking, Storehouse was a very enjoyable and different experience and would be a gripping and provocative way to spend an evening with friends, or indeed to meet new people, re-focusing us on the importance of real-life, interpersonal connections, however fleeting. Ending on the deck of a free bar, looking across the Thames to Canary Wharf, I couldn’t help but think of the relationships between the centres of global economic power and the information ecosystems that help uphold them, Storehouse’s setting offering a final opportunity to consider its message.

STOREHOUSE

Deptford Storehouse

Reviewed on 11th June 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Helen Murray

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STOREHOUSE

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

At the centre point of the performance, ten-year-old Specky Clark, played by Faith Prendergast, walks across the stage to a radio in the rear corner and turns it on to a dance tune by David Holmes. The music begins quietly, appearing to come from the on-stage radio, and the child starts tentatively to move, before casting off his inhibitions and dancing freely and joyfully, the music booming from the theatre’s speakers. The movements recall the freestyle dance of someone alone in their bedroom: balletic kicks interwoven with techno-club fist pumping and are exhilarating and childlike.

In the rear of the stage, which is dressed as the abattoir where Clark has been sent to work by his overbearing aunts, a series of fabric sheets hang to imitate pigs’ carcasses. One of these opens and a head emerges. It is the pig killed by Clark on his first day at the abattoir that has been resurrected by the child’s dancing for Samhain, the Gaelic festival when the departed return to life, marking the beginning of the ‘Darker Half’ of the year. This moment of rupture also marks the point at which the performance shifts from the everyday into the supernatural and the performers’ dancing becomes freer and less bound by the expectations of the quotidian.

Oona Doherty’s Specky Clark is a fictionalised dramatization of the life of her great great grandfather, sent to live with relatives in Belfast after the death of his parents in Glasgow. It intermixes biography with Gaelic traditions and is permeated by the Irish language. The piece has a strong ensemble of nine dancers in gender-swapped multiroles including Erin O’Reilly, Maëva Berthelot and Malick Cissé. True to life, it is both funny and sad, and Specky’s domineering aunts’ manhandling of the child into and out of clothes and into work at the slaughterhouse to a refrain of ‘awk poor child’, ‘God love him’ is both tragic and comical. The physical performance of these aunts is a high point of the show as they peck birdlike around their new charge, a formidable double act that will shape the orphan’s life. The resurrected pig’s crawling and contorting is also excellent.

Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant, characterised by spiralling repetitions, and the sound design by Maxime Jerry Fraisse, powerful. The use of Sardinian throat singing when Specky is made to shoot the pig approaches the transcendent and original music by Lankum is good. The staging by scenographer Sabine Dargent conjures an achronological Belfast ranging from the mid-twentieth century to today, echoing the slippage between worlds of the performance’s climax. The opening is particularly striking, as Specky screams over the body of a dead parent, a life-sized puppet of death jerkily enters behind him, reaching to touch the lifeless body and raise it up – this shocking beginning sets the eerie tone for the piece.

However, some elements of the performance are less effective. A scene in which Specky is assaulted in the street after a day at work feels a little disconnected and inconsequential and the integration of Fortnite dances, while perhaps age appropriate for Specky, took me out of the moment. I also felt that the two sections of the performance, the ‘real’ and the ‘supernatural’, could have been better integrated and perhaps a longer runtime could have allowed for a fuller development of these ideas.

Nevertheless, in its scope and the powerful performances of Prendergast and the rest of the company there is much to commend Specky Clark, and the rapturous applause which greeted the end of the production suggests that maybe it just wasn’t for me.

STOREHOUSE

Deptford Storehouse

★★★½

“a multifaceted and engaging experience”

STOREHOUSE

Deptford Storehouse

Reviewed on 11th June 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Helen Murray

Recently reviewed by Rob:

STOREHOUSE

STOREHOUSE

STOREHOUSE

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

★★★

“Oona Doherty’s script is amusing and poignant”

SPECKY CLARK

Sadler’s Wells Theatre

Reviewed on 9th May 2025

by Rob Tomlinson

Photography by Luca Truffarelli

Recently reviewed at Sadler’s Wells venues:

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

SPECKY CLARK

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