Standing up to corporate culture in taut Orwellian horror
Contractions Crucible Theatre, Sheffield
Mike Bartlett is a dramatist fascinated by the tension between individuals and the institutions they (willingly or not) inhabit. His most recent play, Wild, now running at the Hampstead Theatre, concerns an Edward Snowden-like revealer of state secrets, while King Charles III envisaged the reign of a reluctant future monarch.
In Contractions (2008), a ferociously intense two-hander, Bartlett presents a brutal collision between corporate control and individual autonomy. The drama unfolds in a series of brief interviews between a nameless Human Resources manager (played by Sara Stewart) and a young sales executive, Emma (Rose Leslie). Forbiddingly encased in tailored black officewear, with an immaculate peroxide up-do and a lacquered maquillage that threatens to splinter as she bares her teeth in a rictus smile of infinite menace, Stewart exudes all the humanity of a glacier.
Leslie, whose previous roles include the spear-maiden, Ygritte, in Game of Thrones, is a fragile, almost waiflike figure, dressed in complexion-sapping grey with intimations of prison garb. But a steely edge of defiance animates her encounters with the manager, in meetings that increasingly come to resemble bruising bouts in some grim spiritual wrestling match.
The issue that concerns the manager is Emma’s friendship with a colleague, Darren. The terms of her contract – which, for the sake of clarity, she is forced to read aloud – exclude “any relationship, activity or act” between fellow-workers “which could be characterised as sexual or romantic”. Emma’s initial denial that she has engaged in any such act is not enough to satisfy her interrogator. In scenes that build to a quiet crescendo of Orwellian horror, the very essence of her being is exposed, dismantled and refashioned for optimum corporate benefit.
To achieve its full effect, the horror of Bartlett’s play requires extreme restraint. Overdo the inhumanity of the manager or the anguish of Emma’s slow torture and the drama descends into lurid caricature. But there is no danger of that in Lisa Blair’s taut and beautifully balanced production.
Fly Davis’s design, all glittering, clinical monochrome, places the protagonists on either side of a blindingly lit white office desk, set on a slow revolve that seems to wind up the tension with every passing moment.
Stewart and Leslie feint and parry in finely nuanced confrontations whose pathos is intensified by the appalling intimation that the manager might once, long ago, have recognised in herself the young woman whom she is now systematically destroying.
This review appeared in some editions yesterday