{"id":936696,"date":"2026-05-04T08:18:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T08:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/936696\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T08:18:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T08:18:23","slug":"you-are-here-review-danny-boyles-chaos-from-teddy-boys-to-brexit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/936696\/","title":{"rendered":"You Are Here review \u2014 Danny Boyle\u2019s chaos, from teddy boys to Brexit"},"content":{"rendered":"

Outside London\u2019s Royal Festival Hall the Blitz was being reenacted in miniature, with ashen-faced actors standing stunned in bomb debris and smoke. Inside, carnage and smoke of a different sort: a huge disco floor heaving with sweaty flesh and thumping bass-lines.<\/p>\n

Outside again, 1950s teddy boys (and girls) pumped up with aggro confronting Windrush arrivals and engaging in a violent territorial dance in front of a set that displayed revered British icons symbolically swept up on a rubbish heap. Inside again, the Festival Hall\u2019s arena transformed into a twinkling galaxy of stars while a lone fiddler played, teenagers danced themselves into exhaustion and, incongruously, \u201cShirley Bassey\u201d (or a very young lookalike) allowed us a peek into her dressing room.<\/p>\n

This was You Are Here, the Southbank Centre\u2019s noisy, sprawling anniversary party, held 75 years to the day after the Festival of Britain opened on this site. Gerald Barry, the director of that 1951 jamboree, famously promised \u201ca tonic to the nation\u201d which, by and large, it proved to be. Danny Boyle, the film director who masterminded You Are Here<\/a>, declared his aim to be \u201ccurated chaos\u201d and he, too, certainly delivered on his promise.<\/p>\n

\"PerformersHUGO GLENDINNING<\/p>\n

The six-hour event involved a thousand technicians, ushers and performers (mostly DJs and dancers), directed by half a dozen of Boyle\u2019s tried and trusted mates: designers, directors and writers who have worked on his films and his previous mass spectaculars for London 2012 and the opening of the Aviva Studios in Manchester. <\/p>\n

They sent about 10,000 punters, marshalled into time-slots, on a two-hour walkabout through the Festival Hall (also celebrating its 75th birthday), its foyers and its usually hidden innards. I\u2019ve been in that building thousands of times but I was ushered up stairwells, thumping with sci-fi soundtracks, that I\u2019ve never climbed before and won\u2019t be rushing to revisit. <\/p>\n

\"TheHUGO GLENDINNING<\/p>\n

The point of it all? It was billed as a \u201cfreewheeling journey of discovery\u201d tracing \u201cBritish youth culture and social movements\u201d over the past 75 years. Occasionally you came across displays \u2014 billboards of pasted-on newspapers recalling the three-day week or Brexit<\/a>, for instance \u2014 that suggested a desire at some early stage in this event\u2019s planning to delve into deeper questions of what it meant to grow up in London between 1951 and now.<\/p>\n

But overall it was a bit of a superficial mishmash. Superficial even on its own music terms. Before the event, organisers had spoken promisingly about offering a kaleidoscope of \u201crebellious\u201d music since the Second World War. In the event we had a lot of DJs playing standard 21st-century dance floor music, but little of, say, the rebels of the Sixties or punk rock\u2019s raucous discords.<\/p>\n

I recognise that the idea was to attract a new youthful audience to the Southbank, but the vast majority of the punters seemed to be the usual middle-aged Southbank regulars. And many elements of the show seemed half-developed, possibly because of budgetary constraints. I was expecting some great Boyle stunt to end the show \u2014 the monarch parachuting down from on high, perhaps \u2014 but instead there was a sense of \u201cis that it?\u201d<\/p>\n

And of course there wasn\u2019t a hint of the real cultural significance of the Festival Hall \u2013 Britain\u2019s foremost classical music venue with six resident orchestras. That was considered far too dull, no doubt.<\/p>\n

\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606\u2606<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Outside London\u2019s Royal Festival Hall the Blitz was being reenacted in miniature, with ashen-faced actors standing stunned in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":936697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-936696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116515328545925594","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/936697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}