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 Blue/Orange

Blue/Orange
by Joe Penhall

Typecasting
http://www.youngvic.org/

Imagine a world where the police detain a citizen without trial and any crime committed and then wash their hands of him or her. Where the detainee is transformed into a patient and  handed over to doctors and a hospital ward which, in the words of Joe Penhall's Blue/Orange, is effectively "a prison".

Where self-regulation rules, opinions rather than proof are regarded as evidence, where medicine is turned into a tribal greasy pole and patients are blank canvases used to support the ambitions and aims of consultants. And it seems from Penhall's piece the doctors to preserve the illusion hide from the detainee that their ability to keep the citizen can be overruled by tribunal after 28 days.

Welcome to the world of the section.

Except watching senior consultant Robert (David Haig), his junior Bruce (Luke Norris) manoeuvre and debate over black detainee Christopher (Daniel Kaluuya) as to shall-he-stay? or shall-he-go?, TLT and her own compos mentis companion were not so sure.

For Christopher, who seems to incorporate at various times all the different opinions, more than tinged with racial bias, of the medics as regards types of patients, comes from the "White City" estate, was picked up for "acting funny" - those seeking to break into TV comedy, watch out - in Shepherd's Bush market.

Ok, he also believes he is the natural son of "Butcher of the Bush" Idi Amin but if it's a  delusion (who knows when nobody seems to need any proof except opinion), it's a harmless one. Only once is mention of suicide brought up and we're never quite sure if it's convenient for the records or if he really has suicidal thoughts. 

As the consultants talk and behaviour grows more and more outrageous and crude, something began to dawn on your intrepid twosome. For surely the consulting room in the square designed by Jeremy Herbert, surrounded by the audience who entered through a basement National Health Service waiting room which could still be seen, at times, through gaps in the stage.beneath, could stand for any national institution?

Mentions of the property boom, institutionalised racism, sporting fixtures with the vagueness surrounding the section all segued nicely into our own theory about this play. Hey, we may not have a book deal like manipulative consultant Robert, with David Haig channelling by increments his own inner God/Jesus/Archbishop complex,  but we definitely can publish!

For it doesn't seem as if you need the inmates taking over the asylum when you have these docs who all seem to have their own lawyers as well for extra insurance.

But hang on a moment, Shepherd's Bush, White City, the market, could playwright J Penhall Esq in his 2000 play possibly be talking about another institution, now again on the brink of yet another major upheaval? :o No, surely not?!

Anyway director Matthew Xia keeps the more subtle and the nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw balls expertly in the air at the same time and the three-strong cast show, in the words of Marx (Groucho and Chico, that is) 'Sanity Clause, Sanity Clause, there ain't no Sanity Clause'! So we promote Blue/Orange to a big bucks TLT apple green light