The Guardian
The director’s immersive Southbank Centre takeover has vim and ardour in spades, if not complete coherence You Are Here is an undertaking on an impressive scale: a self-styled “epic, one-off pop-cultural spectacular” involving immersive theatre, dance, music and a “cast of hundreds”, all directed by Danny Boyle. It takes up a hefty chunk of the Southbank Centre and sets itself a similarly hefty task: “reimagining some of the most vivid and influential youth and social movements that have driven culture forward since 1951”, the year of the Festival of Britain , when the Royal Festival Hall opened for business. “Some of” turns out to be the operative phrase: there’s an awful lot going on, but even so, the sheer enormity of its subject means a degree of selectivity is necessary. Its take on British pop culture takes a noticeably dancefloor-centric view. There’s more about rave than the 60s pop explosion that really shifted the UK out of the postwar doldrums the You Are Here audience first encounters (you wander through an authentically eerie evocation of smog-bound London, its inhabitants literally grey), while New Romantics and Britpop are hard to spot, and the hippy counterculture of the late 60s and early 70s gets very short shrift indeed, unless you count the repurposing of some old west London graffiti that may have been the handiwork of “alternative society” collective the Albion Free State (“THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE HORSES OF INSTRUCTION”). Continue reading...
Go to News Site