In the (horrible) foyer before the performance, there is pre-show stuff to get us in the mood – people in canvas/workwear style trenchcoats (like the Matrix but Manchesterified i think was the idea) and some of them have oversized White Rabbit heads, and others are balancing on giant Duracell batteries like a circus. There is a stylised sort of keycutting workshop to one side as a sort of installation where people go over and an usher asks if you want your picture taken standing there. There is quite a lot of merch for sale as well. I’ve long been an advocate for more theatre/companies selling merch, but I meant more in a ‘getting a sticker/patch/tshirt from your mates band at the merch table after their band played a set’ type way and less ‘it’s Wicked on the West End and they have fifteen different shirts and drink cups and £10 special programmes and ornaments and hats’ and this was the latter. Merch aside this pre-show stuff is actually quite cool for a show so commercial and is novel and genuinely does make the show/the venue feel quite different to lots else in Manchester. Some might use the word ‘immersive’ to describe this, but they’d be wrong.
Maze to get up to our seats in the main venue (a bar on every floor!) including some escalators and then the main venue we are in is massive but kind of intimate. Feels like an old venue but NEW if that makes sense. Like, we are in the circle and it feels classic like the Circle at The Opera House/The Palace in that slight vertigo-y way rather than the vast dead expanse of the Circle in The Lowry for example. My friend pointed out that it was refreshing to see yellow velour seats since like 99% of theatres have red velour seats.
Show starts with Alan Turing on a little telly and then as a human performer onstage with a cool monologue about technological development, Manchester in that, and The Singularity. First half is overall pretty good. Very good dancing, some extraordinary visuals – highlights include the holes being punched out of the backdrop and dancers in stretchy, fleshy material, attached to the ceiling that echoes the sacs that humans are kept asleep in in the movie, that Neo wakes up in. The Matrix stuff is mostly peppered in and vibes-based rather than scene-for-scene. We first meet Neo, Trinity kung-fu’s the cops etc. They do have the ENTIRE Agent-Smith-interrogates-Morpheus monologue which feels quite long. Most interesting about the first half is what seems to be the retelling of the first time a robot kills a human from The Matrix lore which is really affecting. Movement of the Robot performers is like watching magic and the robots are in a cute old-timey steampunk bowler hat style. There is a sort of proletarian uprising (the Girl in The Red Dress is a sort of Helen of Troy type mascot here), revolution or-is-it-actually armageddon thread which culminates in a spectacular battle/fall at the end of the first half. ‘Spectacular’ is how I would describe much of the first half – each scene or sequence has a central ‘spectacle’, a specific visual statement that utilises the dramatic scale of the space to create something really powerful. Pauses after each section/’number’ and we all clap which I don’t personally like but that’s a me thing.
Half time and we Follow the White Rabbits to the horrible foyer. There are not enough exits and we have to trundle and this takes ages. In the foyer performers are freeze-framed (street entertainer style) in Matrix action poses like a wall-run or the iconic backwards dodge. Punters take pictures. The poor guys look knackered by the end of the 20 minutes.
Second half we are in a different space – big wide end-on stage in a warehouse shape with a screen in front of us playing Very Long Pong. Seats for people who needed them at the front and a rake of a few rows behind us. God I wish I wasnt going to be stood up for 45 minutes. Second half opens with a fun montage of Manchester/technology to Blue Monday. Not sure how that relates to where we left off at the end of Act One but sure. After a cool reveal (screen lifts up and we see theres more of us (audience) on the other side!! It’s not end-on at all but traverse!!) the show falls apart in quite a big way as the ensemble get phones out and become zombies glued to the screen and i groan and my friend turns to me and says ‘I wonder what this bits about?’ Strange glitch edits of the Netflix sting? Voguing Amazon parcel character? Facebook ‘Like’ hands on a Blue Tick character? Dancers wearing morphsuits to look like….. Google Chrome? All quite trite and on-the-nose and ‘ooo-tech-bad’ and 2017 but worst of all seemingly completely removed from the awe/suspense of where we ended up in the first half. My back hurts so much. And its weird cos the best thing about the Matrix is that thematically its so timeless but this stuff in Free Your Mind is very specifically dated.
After walking around with Morpheus and shaking his head at everything so we know he thinks all this Big Tech and consumerism is Not On At All, Neo helps a TV addict stop watching the screen (…) and we are back to the Matrix but this time we are just doing all the scenes. I think this is quite cool cos I like good dance and I really like the Matrix but it does feel much less imaginative than the first half, like they could be two different creative teams honestly. Jesus Christ my back. So we get Neo learning kung-fu and Morpheus gets kidnapped and the corridor shootout when Neo and Trinity rescue him (cool needledrop of something that sounds like the iconic Clubbed To Death here which popped me) and we get the Agent Smith fight and ‘My name is Neo’ and stopping bullets at the end (curious and noticeable absence of basically any of the trans allegory stuff from the movies which is crazy, a shame and maybe quite telling). I keep thinking of the handheld massager I have at home and asking my flatmate to go to town on my spine with it when I get in. One of the weirdest things in the whole show is at the end, Neo and Trinity and the whole ensemble do the triumphant final number, and a distorted image of Aviva Studios (the building itself) swirls on the screens above. Why? What does that mean? We beat the baddies with the help of the venue building? Factory International? Manchester City Council? What does that have to do with The Matrix ? What does that have to do with Amazon? Or Manchester? Or the first half of the show when things were good? My back, my poor fucking back.
I dunno.
Rage Against The Machine’s Wake Up is not what plays while the ensemble does their bows which is a shame.
onlytheantscansaveusnow 