All the world's a self-storage unit: the show unpacking our cluttered lives

Self-storage depots: they line our slip-roads, throng industrial estates, loom up unexpectedly in the middle of cities and populate the no-man’s land where town turns to countryside. But who is filling them – and with what?

This was the question Daphna Attias found herself asking when she used a self-storage unit for the first time to stow some old sets for her theatre company Dante or Die. The man on the front desk gave her a simple answer: couples. Couples who are breaking up and moving out and want to put their stuff in storage – then never come back for it. Attias’s immediate thought: “That’s the start of the story.”

Which is why I’m on the outskirts of Reading on a Friday night, pulling off the A33 and parking at the Lok’nStore to watch Dante or Die’s latest immersive theatre show. Handle With Care tracks one woman, Zoe, from the tail-end of her teens in the late 1980s through work, marriage and motherhood to the present day, all through the possessions she packs and unpacks from an ever-growing pile of cardboard boxes. It’s the stuff of decluttering guru Marie Kondo’s worst nightmares.

“In the 80s and 90s, we used to have tapes and CDs and record-players and photo albums, these physical things that took up space and which we carried from one place to another,” says Attias. “Now we keep everything on our iPhones or in the cloud. At the same time, technology means there is so much stuff we can buy with one click. So we consume a lot more and it’s hard to get rid of things. What do you do with an old toaster? We wanted to explore life in relation to our belongings.”

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And where better to do so than a self-storage warehouse? After all, it’s no great stretch for a company that has previously made shows at leisure centres and Hilton hotels. Written by Chloë Moss, who also wrote Dante or Die’s I Do and the Guardian’s fashion microplay Devil in the Detail, Handle With Care is an intricately choreographed bit of theatre that finds in the strip-lit corridors and corrugated units of self-storage a powerful metaphor for our emotional hinterland. The company even worked with a University College London psychologist who specialises in memory to develop its show.

“We wanted to understand why we keep all these things,” says Attias. “So much of how we access our memories is sensory and, of course, smell is the strongest sense of all.” It’s why people keep old perfume bottles, she says, and why Zoe holds on to her little brother’s can of deodorant. “Everything has meaning because of some connection we had at some point in our lives. It’s about relationships, not objects.”

Thanks to some excellent sound design, the show is a musical journey, too, from classic Stone Roses on a C90 mixtape, via Gorillaz and Gotye, to Taylor Swift on Zoe’s daughter Mickey’s iPhone. It’s easy to get caught up in your own nostalgia trip – somewhere between Nirvana and Blur I have to pinch myself back to the drama in front of me.

The echoes multiply: Zoe is played by two actors for two concurrent audiences on two separate floors of the building, her younger and older selves meeting in a trippy scene that should come with a health warning for anyone who finds human-sized rabbits at a rave in any way disturbing. Attias says the casting came down to practicality. “But also I feel like I woke up after I had children, and that girl you were when you were 20 feels like a memory of yourself.”

A touring production with so many parts is not without its challenges, she adds. “In Salford, we had one show where the fire alarm went off 19 times. And we’ve had a lot of customers walk in, too. Chloe called me after one performance and said there was a family of four, packing up a huge pile of stuff next to Zoe. When the audience spilled out at the end, the family were loading everything into a van. They turned on the ignition and drove off. An audience member said: ‘Were they part of the show?’ I wish!”

In one scene, Mickey asks her mum: why pay to keep this stuff somewhere you are not? It’s the paradox of self-storage. We can’t live with or without these things. Zoe locks up and we leave, too, to the strains of Ryan Adams’s acoustic cover of Shake It Off. Should we? “If you’re asking me if Marie Kondo is right and we should just have two boxes and nothing else, I wish every day that I could come home and throw it all away,” says Attias. “At least, I started this process wanting to make that statement. But I think, in the end, each of us deserves a little sentimental comfort.”