STOREHOUSE – Deptford Storehouse, London

STOREHOUSE at Convoy’s Wharf offers an incredible immersive set paired with a timely if ultimatly slightly inconsequential meditation on information, truth, and digital overload.

STOREHOUSE: A Vast Archive of Stories and Warnings

Immersive theatre is often about worlds within worlds – secret chambers behind warehouse doors, imagined histories inside forgotten buildings. And Sage & Jester’s STOREHOUSE, now occupying the cavernous newspaper warehouse at Convoy’s Wharf in Deptford (reimagined as a space called, pragmatically, Deptford Storehouse), feels like an extension of that tradition. But this isn’t escapism. It’s not The Burnt City’s mythological dreamscape nor Viola’s Room’s directive surrealism. Instead, STOREHOUSE attempts to be something more grounded and unsettling. It’s a lesson in information, media, and their impact on our lives, relationships, democracy: ultimately the world we live in.

Visitors to STOREHOUSE become, for the evening, “trustees” of a vast underground archive: a secret repository storing all human digital knowledge since the dawn of the internet. The set-up is immediately rather fun. We leave bags at the door, take a lanyard, and start the long journey into the underworld of knowledge down dimly lit corridors that feel like a relic of the site’s newspaper-printing past. The cleverness of the space itself, 9,000 square metres of real industrial history, is immediately apparent. It’s used in its entirety, allowing the audience to feel genuinely lost, both physically and conceptually, in the labyrinth of information.

Inside, the physical world-building is meticulous (design by Alice Helps). The narrative world-building a little less so (and interestingly, this was done by the committee of a writers’ room). The ‘stackers’, ‘bookbinders’ and ‘caretakers’ we meet are not just exposition-spouting guides but characters with backstories and purpose. Visitors solve puzzles, decode clues, listen closely, and vote on key outcomes. The experience balances openness with narrative direction: there’s room to wander and explore, unlike in the stricter choreography of a Viola’s Room, but it’s more guided than the radical freedom of a Burnt City. However, the issue is that it all ends up being a bit of a blunt instrument.

A Cautionary Tale for the Digital Age

Without spoiling the finer details of the narrative twists, STOREHOUSE is ultimately a meditation on media literacy. Perhaps not a common theme for immersive theatre, but timely in an age of algorithmic misinformation and manipulated narratives. The production explores the nature of truth, bias, and the staggering flood of information we encounter daily. News distortion, statistical misuse, sensationalism, digital deluge: all of this is laid out for visitors to experience, question, and (crucially) vote upon. It’s not subtle, and maybe it shouldn’t be. But the crowd-sourced answers on what to do about it, towards the end of the narrative, feel slightly underwhelming. The writing could do with being a little punchier.

Sage & Jester’s debut production is technically astonishing, though. From the sound design and lighting to the physical sensations of the archive itself (texture, scent, even taste via a drink and fortune cookie) this is a full sensory experience . The immersive layering is wonderfully done, its details thoughtful and often witty. There’s a small issue with sound bleed at the emotional climax, where parallel narrative strands begin to merge and the audio from one group intrudes into another’s space, momentarily breaking the illusion. But this is minor in a production of such scale and complexity.

I was a little surprised that STOREHOUSE has such a short run (just sixteen weeks). Even with the relative narrative weakness, it feels like the kind of work that could comfortably settle into a longer London residency, drawing in curious locals eager to see behind the hoardings at Convoy’s Wharf before the next stage of its redevelopment. I’ll hope to see more from Sage & Jester: I would definitely come back for the set design alone. For now, this is an enjoyable immersive show that ticks a number of boxes. Stay for a drink afterwards in the riverside bar and enjoy a rare glimpse of Deptford’s past and possible future.

Salterton Arts Review’s rating: 3.5/5

STOREHOUSE on until 20 September 2025. More info and tickets here.