Review: ASSES.MASSES, Battersea Arts Centre

Would you spend over seven hours with a hundred other people in the same room playing and watching a video game where donkeys attempt to overthrow their employers? Presented as part of London Games Festival‘s side events programme, asses.masses is an unusual experience that could well hold the key to theatre’s future.

That might sound like a bold claim but let’s take a look at where we are. Financially, things are looking a tad more precarious along Shaftesbury Avenue despite the constant conveyor belt of screen-to-stage adaptations and a seemingly limitless number of green-screen stars lining up to tread the boards.

Official figures released this week from the Society of London Theatres suggest that the post-pandemic honeymoon is over with West End audience numbers flatlining compared to last year. Meanwhile, the regional scene is in danger of collapsing: a 2024 survey described how, without urgent investment, nearly 40 per cent of UK theatre buildings are at risk of closure.

Creatively, there is a sense that the industry is in something of a rut. When not leaning on established IP for ticket sales, companies are falling back on reliable repetitions in the form of revivals, reboots and rehashes. We’ve already had two major stabs at Oedipus in just the last four months, both with Hollywood names attached.

Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing has been the hit of the year so far; in May, Michael Longhurst debuts his own take for the RSC. Those looking for love in all the usual places can go see Romeo & Juliet  one, two, three or four times between now and August. Original blockbusters like Kyoto and Kenrex are few and far between. 

Video games, on the other hand, are booming in every sense. Take Minecraft, for example. The game was bought by Microsoft in 2014 for the then-staggering sum of $2.5bn and, by 2019, had grown its userbase to 112 million players. It is still incredibly popular and now boasts about 170 million active players around the globe, a new film starring Jason Momoa and Jack Black, a brand new immersive experience in Canada Water and plans to open a theme park in the UK.

They’re lucrative too. As fans of pub quizzes know, the biggest entertainment product in the world is not a film, an album or a TV show but a controversial twelve-year-old bit of software called Grand Theft Auto V. This adult-orientated collection of ones and zeros has so far pulled in around ten billion dollars and its successor is predicted to earn its creators $3.2bn in just the first year. As a handy contrast, no film has ever made more than $3bn in lifetime earnings and the highest-grossing non-musical Broadway show last year (Harry Potter And The Cursed Child) pulled in a comparatively paltry $64m.

Streaming services have been quick off the mark to switch the attention of gamers away from their consoles with successful efforts including Amazon Prime Video’s Fallout, HBO’s The Last Of Us and Sky’s Gangs Of London. With notable exceptions like Phantom Peak, Bridge Command and Save The Princess, the theatre world has been relatively catatonic in its response to a cultural shift that has only been accelerated by the pandemic-era stay-at-home orders.

So what is asses.masses all about? Co-created by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim with superb dramaturgy from Laurel Green, this Canadian show has already found worldwide success and has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.

Over ten episodes and four intervals, we follow a herd of farm donkeys who find themselves literally put out to pasture after being replaced by machinery. While some are happy to run around the fields or just wallow in misery, others look to persuade the humans to give them back their old jobs and set off to discuss the matter. And so begins an epic odyssey.

The physical setup is relatively simple with the game projected onto a screen and self-selecting volunteers taking turns on a standard console controller. Initially, they walk Trusty Ass around the meadows talking to other donkeys with similarly whimsical names. In the back of a barn, Old Ass lays out some exposition and we get all optimistic for the future with the pregnant Sturdy Ass. Our interactions often trigger conversation options. Is it better to tell the depressed Sad Ass a comforting white lie or the unvarnished truth? And do we side with the revolutionary-minded Hard Ass who wants to see the world burn or go with Smart Ass’ idea of seeking compromise with the human overlords? 

Side-quests pop up as we go along, helping us bond with other characters. The stuttering Slow Ass is building a bridge and needs our assistance finding wood, while the laidback Nice Ass invites us to join them in “doing a line”; cue merciless pounding of the controller as we plow a furrow (not a euphemism) as fast as we can. By the time this herd starts on its adventure, it already feels that we know the donkeys and their various traits well.

All of that occurs in the first thirty minutes or so. Before long, like Dorothy in The Wizard Of Oz, we leave the farm in the company of new friends and then everything gets much, much darker. Antagonists arrive in the form of the town boss Hugh G Butte and Mme. Derriere, the owner of the “Assorted Meats and Beauty Products” factory. Not all the donkeys survive the journey and we get to travel to a heavenly afterlife that is less about angels and harps and more about drugs, orgies and the infamous Sh*thole.

In between the plethora of cut-scenes, asses.masses is in many ways a love letter to computer gaming. There’s some heavily pixellated gore in a couple of episodes but generally these are exceptions, not the rule. Rather, this is a charming as all hell foray into the history of this art form from its earliest days through to the present.

As we wander around 2D and 3D worlds, we encounter bat-and-ball minigames, a Spy Hunter-ish road adventure, a gruesome roguelite puzzle and Garage Band-like button smashers. There are platformers for jumping about on, courses for us to race around as well as side-scrolling beat-em-ups and vertical-scrolling sneak-em-ups. 

There are times when the audience finds itself frustrated by the sheer difficulty of some sections or bored as we get lost in feature-light environments but - as any devotees of Metal Gear Solid or No Man’s Sky will tell you - this is neither particularly cruel nor unusual punishment when it comes to gaming. Thankfully, there’s no grinding here nor is there any concept of levelling in order to unlock a new chapter. Despite asses.masses being a lengthy and technically complex endeavour, there are surprisingly few glitches.

There’s limited audience interaction at the beginning but that builds over time in both direct and indirect ways. On a few occasions, more than one person is needed to control the characters and the final scene has up to four people helping out.

Moreover, asses.masses is a beautiful marathon of an experience where the impact of the storylines are amplified throughout the room: it’s one thing to quietly cheer on a small victory or groan at yet another dad joke of a donkey name, it’s another to hear these quiet personal sounds echoed simultaneously by a hundred people at the same time and then have everyone laughing at our reactions. 

This ramps up as we go along. We rejoice loudly when we bump into donkeys we haven’t seen since the early episodes. We cheer as enemies are defeated and the donkeys escape to freedom. We shout out directions to whoever is holding the controller, we scream when we spot the latest McGuffin and, every time Smart Ass rolls out their latest seemingly-impossible plan to get the donkeys out of trouble, we join them in shouting out their closing exclamation of “Easy!” 

The length of the show may put some off. At over seven hours, it is longer than the entire first season of White Lotus and most operas. Thanks to Green's sterling work, though, these donkeys become more endearing and fully-formed the more we know about them and their world. Those who see asses.masses as an in-person Twitch session should perhaps go see more theatre to understand how live experiences in a shared physical space exponentially increase the fun for all involved, much like a rock gig compared to Spotify listening parties.

There is mosh no pit here but, by the end, there’s an undeniable emotional catharsis and a feeling that, if theatre could mine even a small amount of the engagement and feeling in this room, more people would be encouraged to leave their sofas and turn up for theatrical events.

asses.masses returns to the UK later this year.

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