The rather alarming official description for this immersive theatre tie-in with the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Art Riot’ exhibition suggests that ‘Inside Pussy Riot’ might be a sincere attempt to recreate the trial and punishment of Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova. Better known as three members of the Russian protest art collective Pussy Riot, the trio became a global cause célèbre after being arrested for a musical protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Cathedral in 2012.
Clearly there are few more tasteless ideas imaginable than offering Western audiences the chance to experience an authentic flavour of the Russian gulag, for money, in a posh Chelsea art gallery.
But on reflection that doesn’t sound very Saatchi, or indeed the sort of thing you’d expect from vaudeville-inflected immersive theatre bigshots Les Enfants Terribles who’ve been tasked with creating ‘Inside Pussy Riot’.
In fact it’s a heavily ironic deconstruction of its own premise. You’re made to don a brightly coloured balaclava, select a placard with a protest message close to your heart, and travel – with a similarly outfitted group – through a series of rooms that play host to a kitsch, lurid, meta-theatrical, often out-and-out piss-takey representation of Pussy Riot’s ordeal It’s not so much Pussy Riot’s suffering being laid bare as pop culture’s embrace of that suffering.
It looks great and is sometimes funny, but I found it extremely difficult to work out what the point of the whole thing actually was. Is it to send up the sort of person who might go to a show like this? Is it to send up the type of person who would make a show like this? I actually left with the suspicion that the kernel of seriousness at the show’s heart – which mostly comes at the end, with a recorded message from Tolokonnikova – was perhaps supposed to come across more clearly, but had ended up smothered in irony by a company wary of turning in something excessively earnest. Any which way, immersive theatre junkies may dig it but it’s more a muddle than a riot