Cages review – hologram rock musical is a dreary dystopia

Riverside Studios, London
An overreliance on technology and a doomy score can't replace old-fashioned chemistry in this emotionless offering

Anhedonia is a condition that renders the sufferer unable to experience pleasure. In the rock musical Cages, which mixes live performance with holograms, film and animation, it is also the name of a grey dystopian city where the aesthetic is very Tim-Burton-meets-German-expressionism and any display of emotion is forbidden. Hiding in the shadows is the composer Woolf, who sees in Madeline, his pixie-ish muse, the prospect of true love. Can music help them overcome their obstacles?

The most significant one facing Cages is the very technology that acts as its selling-point. Advance word suggests that state-of-the-art holograms - an improvement on the days when Laurence Olivier's floating head was projected on to the stage of the Dominion theatre for Time - will be indistinguishable from live actors. But the disparity whenever Woolf (played in the flesh by CJ Baran) interacts with Madeline (Allison Harvard in virtual form) is all too obvious. No wonder the love story feels bloodless when it depends on hitting marks and matching sight-lines, rather than old-fashioned chemistry and rapport. It doesn't help that the characters communicate via silent-movie intertitles, with a narrator (Harwood Gordon, another hologram) doing all the talking.