Theatre review: Utopia
Roundhouse
Two Stars
If sleep deprivation, breakfast lager and Rolf Harris prove anything, it’s that things that are good at Glastonbury aren’t necessarily good in real life. The same goes for Penny Woolcock’s Utopia, the immersive sound installation that enjoyed a highly praised run at the festival last month. What was trippy fun in a field in Somerset feels naive and underpowered on an overcast day in Chalk Farm.
A giant tower of boxes sits in the middle of the Roundhouse auditorium, each one emblazoned with words like “wealth”, “desirability” and “cool”. After the boxes comes a corridor of pretend rubble, complete with towers of second hand books, a telephone box and discarded shopping trolleys. Voices of real Camden residents fill the space with tales of prostitution, prison and more prosaic things like caring for the elderly.
Woolcock said in a recent interview “In a city like London we walk the same pavements as other people, but our experiences are so different.” Utopia’s diverse stories underline this rather transparent observation, but that’s as insightful as it gets. It’s like strolling through the stoned mind of a first year politics undergraduate who has loads of, like, opinions, about, like, society. Which is probably why it went down so well at Glastonbury.