Office politics can be a keen mirror of group behaviour and social ills, especially in absurdist or comic form, from the polite protest of Herman Melville’s Bartleby to David Brent’s white-collar tyranny.
Slow Violence, a physical comedy devised by Laura Ryder and Harry Kingscott, uses the office space as a slow-burn metaphor for climate catastrophe. We meet Peter (Kingscott) on his first day of work at Happy Holidays, a travel agency on the sixth floor of a building that is falling apart. He notes the room is overheated but his colleague Claire (Ryder) tells him the temperature cannot be turned down because those who control it “upstairs” should not be bothered with such trifles.
This 70-minute show is premised on a clever idea and the performances are lively but the script is weak, it’s not funny enough and the story is stunted. Over halfway in, the biggest plot line is Claire’s job interview for team leader.
The physical comedy brings moments of surrealism and absurdity but the choreography is repetitive and rather too basic, with characters repeatedly coming in and out of the office or moving piles of paper from one place to another on Maria Terry’s set of white desks.
The drip of information from the world outside – reports of tsunamis, holiday resorts on fire, storms and rising rivers – is too emphatically written in and the same goes for the office malfunctions, which build from the heat to flooding that is slowly engulfing the building. Claire’s Pollyanna-ish refusal to acknowledge what is happening – a reflection of societal apathy – is too exaggerated and simplistic.
What stands out is sound designer Ivan Stott’s atmospheric music which combines typewriter noise with contemporary notes of jazz and rumbling electronica. Overall, there is potential to build on the surreal elements here – the management upstairs has a resemblance to the unseen forces in Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter – but there is not enough ominousness and intrigue to charge this office dystopia.
At the Pleasance, London, until 25 March
