For this performance in a secret location, the audience are escorted through Manchester city centre to a desolate post-industrial space scattered with barbed wire and cracked concrete. Mobile phones are locked in pouches before entering an old warehouse building to experience a dystopian vision from grime pioneer Skepta, working in collaboration with Foxfinder playwright Dawn King, design studio TEM and “immersive performance director” Matthew Dunster for this Manchester international festival show.
Dystopia987 is pitched as “a waking dream that presents Skepta’s singular vision of the future: deep, dark, radical and riveting”. Once inside the multiroom cavernous space, the walls read “free energy”, “free your mind”, “free your ego”; headphones give audio instructions to “connect and let go”, asking: “When was the last time you made eye contact with a stranger?”
It’s not very different from a typical nightclub experience. There’s a bar, a chill-out zone, warm up DJs pounding out techno over intense strobes, and when handing over a drinks token I’m told it’s actually for the makeup stall to get my face painted.
Conceptually the show is a little muddy, because Skepta is exploring more of a utopia than a dystopia. For all the sci-fi window dressing, this is a nostalgic ideal of club culture, rather than an exploration of an unjust future world. T-shirts celebrating our dystopian state are sold at £25 a pop and mobile barmen with LED hats flashing Red Stripe wander around – it’s hard to tell whether this is a satire of rapacious commerce, or just rapacious commerce. The vibe is Secret Cinema doing a 1989 rave but replacing ecstasy with craft beer.
Soon a voice booms over the speakers: “Come ... we are free!” A door opens into another huge room. A surge of excitement grows, as a massively impressive three tier floor-to-ceiling stage appears looking like a tower block crossed with an electricity pylon and a spaceship.
Skepta bounces around the bottom two tiers as DJ Maximum drops beats that clatter and crack through the booming sound system. An early outing of That’s Not Me erupts ferociously, before Skepta pays tribute to the imprisoned A$AP Rocky via an impassioned Praise the Lord (Da Shine).
“Everyone is going through some shit but tonight we are going to leave that outside,” he says, intent on creating a meaningful connection with his audience, but he struggles. Repeat requests for his “energy crew” almost veer into pleading at times. “Different energy tonight,” he eventually says. Shutdown ignites the room, as expected, but the quiet and almost subdued goodbye Skepta gives, at an earlier finish time than expected, feels like a weird and deflating exit.
The irony of this intended inhibition-shedding experience is that it in no way comes close to the pandemonium of Skepta’s 2016 show in the same city. There, hundreds of people had phones glued to their hands, not because they were disengaged from the performance, but because they wanted to film and capture the moment that they were so completely lost in. A moment they had arrived at naturally, rather than through repeat instruction.
• The Guardian is a media partner of Manchester international festival, which runs until 21 July.
