Aviva Studios, Manchester until November 5, 2023

Blue pill or red pill?

Going to the inaugural performance – a live reinvention of The Matrix – at Manchester’s spanking new £240m arts venue, Aviva Studios, was always going to be a night of conflicting passions for me.

Passion Number One: I’m rarely blown away by a movie, but seeing a preview of the Wachowskis’ classic back in 1999 was a watershed moment; a science fiction game changer, just as Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner had been in the twenty years before that. I’ve seen The Matrix at least five times and continue to love it, despite the dreary, unwatchable sequels that followed. The prospect of a live action multi-media stage interpretation, overseen by none other than Danny Boyle was, at least on paper, a mouth-watering prospect.

Passion Number Two: Notwithstanding my Essex childhood I’ve spent four decades as a fiercely patriotic Mancunian. Adopted Mancs are a bit like recently minted vegans, or non-smokers in our desire to let everyone know quite how committed we are to the city we have chosen to be our home. And as a theatre, radio and TV practitioner, I’m also fiercely engaged in the tectonic plates shifting under the city’s ever evolving creative landscape. Aviva Studios – a humungous multi-media performance and exhibition space built on the site of the old Granada Studios – was originally pegged at a mere £100m. Eyebrows went into spasm when costs spiraled, doubling the price tag to £200m, although oddly the revelation at its opening that the final bill has come in at nearer £240m seems to have been greeted with a weary shrug, just as the conurbation loses treasured local venues such as the Oldham Coliseum, closed after 130 years for want of £1.8 million.

In this context, Free Your Mind has a lot resting on its shoulders, arguably more than any one show can possibly bear. So perhaps the critical challenge is to forget about the context altogether, and simply ask: Is it any good?

On a technical level, as a piece of pure theatrical spectacle, it’s without doubt big – very big! – bold, and excellently executed in nearly every respect. Based on the premise that Manchester was not only the engine room of the Industrial Revolution, but, with its association with Alan Turing, is also the seedbed of modern computing, Boyle and chums have fashioned a high tech behemoth of a show, reinterpreting the Wachowskis’ story through the medium of robotic, body popping street dance; a thumping soundtrack (taking in drum and bass, trance, electro swing and pretty much every other music genre you can name); a rock opera lightshow with lasers thrown in for good measure; and dazzling high res video displays. All that was missing was the digital kitchen sink.

Entering the foyer, we are instructed to follow the white rabbit, and there are plenty of them to show us to our seats in the cavernous ‘Hall’ auditorium, where, in the middle of a vast stage, on a tiny black and white TV, a digitally regenerated Alan Turing muses on the nature of AI and consciousness and why it’s all terribly relevant to Manchester. So far, so interesting (if a little tenuous). The next hour consists of elements of The Matrix backstory retold almost exclusively in set-piece dance routines.

We have a battle between humans and machines; the trial of the first robot to kill its human master; Neo encounters an abstracted vision of the human batteries (which you understand if you’ve seen the film) or they might just appear as dancers wriggling in giant elasticated condoms if you haven’t, etc. etc. And herein lies the problem. Free Your Mind relies heavily on the audience knowing the original movie in some detail. Without that, many of the ‘scenes’ are hard to decode. I was fine, as I’m across the franchise, but my companion, who had only seen the film once, many years ago was struggling – and even I was baffled when a sort of Kate Bush figure turned up for some reason and did a lot of animated writhing.

It’s all expertly realised. Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante’s immersive score is flawlessly produced. Kenrick ‘H2O’ Sandy’s choreography is sharp and immaculately synchronised – although it struggles when it tries to emulate ‘bullet time’ or Hong Kong style superhuman wire fighting. A sequence where Trinity takes on the Manchester Police is particularly cringeworthy. But… But… well let’s see what the second half has to offer.

After a lengthy interval (more than 30 minutes), the bunnies lead us to a different space, ‘The Warehouse’, where the audience (aside from a lucky few) stand either side of a long, narrow stage akin to a giant fashion-show runway. After watching an interminable game of Pong on the massive HD video screen (I think it is meant to be amusing in a post-modern stylie), the action picks up again, more focused on Neo, Trinity and Morpheus and their battle against their digital foe. The story, such as it is, is clearer in this act, although there are interludes where we are warned of the suffocating dangers of modern tech consumerism in a dance face-off between Amazon, Apple, Google and Twitter… which as well as being a bit trite, felt pretty ironic in a venue that was originally supposed to be called The Factory in homage to Tony Wilson and the legendary Manchester record label, but has now been renamed after an insurance company in the hope that the sponsorship can recoup the overspend. Go figure.

While this second half is more narratively coherent – playing more like a hip Matthew Bourne ballet – I started to lose patience. If there were warnings that I was going to have to stand, I’d missed them, so my legs were aching. The screens running the entire length of the space were ablaze with startling and dynamic imagery – but as video always does in live performance, it draws your eye away, and the human beings on stage are diminished, no matter how much sweat they put into their terpsichorean exertions.

My mind started to wander. When a few in the audience cheered at Neo’s victory over Agent Smith, it seemed decidedly Pyrrhic. If Boyle wants us to celebrate the indefatigable nature of the human spirit, everything about this show says the opposite. Yes, the dancing is pretty good, but as the whole thing plays out to a pre-recorded soundtrack, and has to be timed to pre-programmed video and the rigid strictures of the computerised light show, there is no room for the delicious nuances that might shift from night to night, from moment to moment; or for the interaction of audience with the artists, which should be the raison d’être of a live performance venue. The dancers become just one minor element serving an immutable mechanical whole. Perhaps that is the point – a meta statement writ large – but for £240m I would have liked to have seen our city celebrated for its people, its history, its future, and the way its wonderful heart beats. In a city famed world-wide for its music, there could, at the very least, have been live musicians to counter the sterility of a largely computerised display – a display that told us, in the final moments, that Manchester itself was nothing more than a digital construct. Really?

Somewhere in the process, not only has Manchester got lost, but so has The Matrix. A film that asked us to question the nature of reality itself has been reduced to a vast empty spectacle in a corporately sponsored space, warning us of the folly of looking at our phones too much. The Wachowskis understood (at least in this one film) that sci-fi with a high concept tech premise only succeeds when we believe in and care about the people it depicts. It’s rooted in character. Free Your Mind is just about the tech.

Verdict: Free Your Mind is a spectacular, brilliantly produced ‘Son et Lumière’ with some top end choreography. If that’s enough for you, and you can shake any sense of context from your mind, you’ll have a ball, but as a celebration of Manchester, or of science fiction, it fails to understand either, and my twin passions left the theatre empty handed. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com