Review Wish List

Wish List
by Katherine Soper

Stand And Deliver
https://royalcourttheatre.com/

Are we all now living in a pipe dream Wish List economy since state terminology changed us from citizens to customers?

From the health service, through education,  the workplace and benefits' system, dominated by  computerization and the internet,  Katherine Soper's Bruntwood prize-winning play Wish List strikes a timely Kafkaesque note

Agency worker Tamsn (Erin Doherty) is setting off for her first day at a fulfilment centre. No, it's not a place where all her dreams will be fulfilled but the storage and packing warehouse of an internet mail order company.

She's taken a zero-hours' contract job while her mentally ill younger brother Dean (Joseph Quinn) has had his benefits suspended and possibly taken away altogether.

Allocated a role packaging goods from the conveyor belt,  she finds the heat is on - both literally and figuratively in the oppressively hot working conditions.

She dons the hi-vis vest and uncomfortable plastic boots provided but it's a job where she's just as much a consumer as a worker, paying for a locker and accruing points, although these are not for loyalty but penalties working like warnings which can lead to dismissal.

And rather than simply being computer programmed, the productivity targets seem deliberately set up for failure and to keep the worker psychologically cowed.

Even though they are in competition, she forms a bond with fellow worker Luke (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah). He can afford to be more of more ducker and diver, indulging in apparently undetected petty theft from the firm and covering for Tamsin's relatively inept efforts. For he is off to join another, but less bottom-of-the-pile, conveyor belt, to college and a job in the ambulance service.

Directed by Matthew Xia, Erin Doherty gives a finely tuned performance as Tamsin, a teen dealing with problems which would break many a seasoned adult. Ali-Yebuah has a boyish charm as co-worker and her brother's former schoolmate Luke.

This is in some ways a perfunctory play with plenty of facts written to a template with a seemingly realistic structure giving way to something more fantastical after a bout of drinking, a dream and with the now almost-obligatory-in-new-writing rendition of a song from recent pop culture, in this case Meatloaf's Bat Out Of Hell.

There are also elements which beg basic practical questions. Wouldn't Tamsin have gone to the Citizens Advice Bureau rather than trying to cope alone? Where is Dean's GP? How can Dean afford an internet connection and to keep a bank account as well as the copious amounts of hair gel he orders for his obsessive compulsive disorder? It does sometimes radiate an actorly concentration on character at the expense of some of the practicalities.

Nevertheless, it's the arrangement of ideas behind this play that does herald an original voice, even if the execution of the script feels a little clumsy and the play overlong. There is a clever merging of school, the health service, benefits' system and the warehouse work - in short, much of life - in a bingo game of chance and cheating.

It also reminded TLT that in the 1950s a flurry of time-and-motion style baby "experts" advised, impossibly, that babies should only be fed and picked up at set times and other mechanical tips.  Ready, some critics of this type of parenting said, for working in factories.

It seems that the times have come full circle in this twenty first century play without the increasing affluence that accompanied the post Second World War economy. It's an upper range amber light for a promising debut play from a writer who brings an understanding of how this working environment is now  moulding lives outside the warehouses in a work-unfair state.

Review Deathwatch

Deathwatch

By Jean Genet

Death And The Maiden

 http://www.the-print-room.org/

A criminal hardman awaits execution by guillotine for murder locked up in a cell with two petty criminals who, in spite of everything, have their lives ahead of them. Or so they think ...

Directed by Geraldine Alexander, Deathwatch has  a set designed by Lee Newby with  the feel variously of a circus ring, musical box, birdcage and cage fight venue.  

This dream-like mix of the artificial, the violent and the abstract is heightened by a ringmaster/complicit prison guard figure (Naomi Frederick) - known as The Watch.

Green Eyes (Tom Varey) towers above his two cell companions in strength and audacity, but only he awaits the death sentence for the gruesome murder of a young woman during sexual intercourse. Illiterate, he depends on another to pen his letters to his girlfriend.

LeFranc (Danny Lee Wynter) acts as his secretary, reading out and writing letters for him while teenager Maurice (Joseph Quinn) hovers round the two, engaged in a feud with LeFranc while eroticizing Green-Eyes.

From their cell, they can hear the clink of the prison keys and the sound of "the slicer" as it ends the life of another prisoner.

It's a well-paced, carefully choreographed production with evocative lighting by David Plater and sound by Simon Slater.

Jean Genet wrote the first version of Deathwatch under the title Pour La Belle in 1942 while jailed in Fresnes prison.  Indeed this production of the play is accompanied by an exhibition of  Brixton prisoners'  art.

But at the time of writing, France was under Nazi occupation. Fresnes prison contained petty thieves like Genet but also resistance fighters, whether Communists or those with more right wing sympathies, many of whom were murdered by the Nazis or the Vichy regime French militia. 

Genet's own Trotskyite communist lover was to die on the barricades in 1944 at the hands of the militia while Genet flirted with the aesthetics of fascism.

In this tangle, the play eventually became Haute Surveillance, although by the 1960s Genet was inclined to dismiss it. However in 1985, a year before his death and having taken up the causes of the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, he cut and reworked it. This is the version David Rudkin has now translated as Deathwatch.

And, while not knowing the original, it feels like a faithful translation. Not only conveying the murky intense experience of three men in a prison cell power play but something more.

What came over to TLT and her own cellmate (and we're not sure whether it was an experience we enjoyed) were the complications of Genet's life as criminal and writer emeshed in dangerous criminal,  political and literary associations.

Indeed, while the name Snowball is that of a black prisoner also under sentence of death and kingpin equal to Green-Eyes on the jail block, TLT immediately thought of Animal Farm and the amalgam of Trotsky and Lenin in a character in George Orwell's book with the same name. 

Could it be that the nickname Snowball was making the rounds?! It also fits in with the themes of betrayal, power yet mistrust, certain death - and surveillance - in the play.

Maybe this immersion in imminent execution, a state punishment then in both France and the USSR,  still strikes true - a horrible inevitable real-life ritual, but it is a difficult play to love. Yet the fetishism of murder, eroticism, sexual ambiguity and sadism transformed into sacrament feels horribly accurate.  An amber/green light for a visceral evening.