Work in an unhappy office? Then this will strike a very chilling chord

DE A FINITELY, the groundbreaking theatre company for the deaf, is 15 years old and celebrating with an ambitious production of Mike Bartlett’s 2008 play on brutal workplace politics.

Bartlett is revered for writing Doctor Foster on TV and his recent hit play Albion on stage. But this 55-minute ditty about a hapless young woman who’s censured for a covert office romance pushes its luck a tad too far in its implausible persecution of its prey.

The clever thing about Paula Garfield’s slick production mixing British sign language and speech is that it uses the play as a metaphor for the way deaf people can be pushed around.

Fifi Garfield plays a Stalinist human resources director bearing down on Abigail Poulton, who plays a young woman forced to give up first her boyfriend and then her baby.

And the tinpot exec is made all the more scary for people with normal hearing by communicating only in sign language partially translated in Poulton’s replies. If the initially mundane plot finally beggars belief, Paul Burgess’s design keeps it very real, enthroning the exec behind a huge empty desk with full view of an open-plan office.

Garfield’s bully-girl tactics are alleviated by sardonic humour that will chime all too well with office workers.

And even if the site-specific setting on this vast, echoey former trading floor off London’s Euston Road lacks atmosphere, it’s a salutary reminder of the social isolation experienced by many deaf and disabled people.