A touch of Ab Fab with the brutal straight-talk
‘Get a five-year plan. Because if you don’t, you’re going to wake up one day and the thing you thought would be an interesting thing to do after college is actually your career and then you have to live with it.” Set in the New York offices of a high-end features magazine, Branden Jacobs-jenkins’s Pulitzer Prizeshortlisted play abounds with the sort of brutal straight-talk, honed by the illusion-dissolving acid of wage-slave experience, that’s calculated to make job-seeking millennials violently shudder even as they laugh.
In the cross-cubicle badinage of the preoccupied but somehow never truly focused editorial assistants on “edit” (for which read “career-death”) row, Jacobs-jenkins (partially inspired by his own time on The New Yorker) gives vent to the creative frustrations of those heading out of youth and increasingly alarmed about their prospects. Their promotion opportunities are stymied, as they see it, by the selfish “boomers” who had it so hedonistically easy in the pre-internet days.
In less capable hands, this sort of thing could swiftly devolve into a water-cooler whinge writ large.
But Jacobs-jenkins has intelligent fun, as do the cast of Michael Longhurst’s smart and sharply nuanced, if a little restrained, UK premiere, with the sense of entitlement of these gossips, back-stabbers and literary titans manqué.
There’s even a touch of Absolutely Fabulous, as the spikiest of the pack – Kae Alexander’s lip-curling Kendra and Ellie Kendrick’s fresh and twofaced Ani – break into a mourning duet for a newly OD’D pop star, to the bemusement of a young black intern, upon whom the office, which also numbers the endearingly fretful Dean (Colin Morgan), bestows preposterous errands to a vending machine that’s only metres away.
Just when it looks like it might run out of satirical puff, something horrible happens courtesy of Sian Clifford’s barely glimpsed office malcontent, Gloria. After which, during a longish second half that finally wings us to an LA TV company, there’s a desperate scramble among those involved in the incident, however indirectly, to commodify their trauma as a publishing sensation.
Although this issue has its fascination, there’s only so much time you want to spend in the company of the self-absorbed. I wasn’t fully persuaded, either, that the trick of having the actors double up roles to disconcerting effect added much to a theme that already carries a sense of déjà vu.
And yet the evening’s essential thrill is unmistakable: the sighting of a major new talent. It blazes bright, if not quite yet in excelsis. Until July 22. Tickets: 020 7722 9301; hampsteadtheatre.com