Barcelona wit doesn’t cut it
Menier Chocolate Factory
SPANISH WRITER Jordi Galceran’s teasing and sometimes tense satire about corporate culture was a hit in Barcelona. But transporting the setting to New York — the city that spawned such writers as Neil Simon, Stephen Adly Guirgis and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to name but three — only reveals that, while Galceran has interesting things to say about the cut-throat world of big business, he needs to say them with much more wit.
The setting is a meeting room high up in a New York corporation’s skyscraper. Four candidates have arrived for the last stage in a selection process designed to reveal who is best suited for a coveted executive position. Frank (Jonathan Cake) is your alpha-male take-no-prisoners kind of exec; Melanie (Laura PittPulford) is a high-flying smooth operator, Rick (John Gordon Sinclair) is a gauche, middle-ranking manager hoping to give his career a much-needed boost and Carl (Greg McHugh) is flamboyant but perhaps more approachable than his fellow applicants.
It emerges, however, that the quartet are not going to be interviewed for the coveted vacancy, rather they will be tested in a way that would make the perfect reality TV show. The applicants are set tasks delivered in sealed envelopes proffered by a sinister drawer that opens from the office wall. The tasks expose and pressure the candidates, and from early on in the process they — and we — are told that one them is a fake applicant who works for the company’s HR department. But who?
It’s all very intriguing and the tricky plot keeps us in doubt as to the characters’ true identities. Yet although director B. T. McNicholl keeps the tension going for much of the play’s uninterrupted 90 minutes, he can only do so for as long as Galceron’s writing allows. It may be that Spain has a different sense of humour from that in London or New York.
But where these characters think they are being funny or even just interesting, usually they are not. Cake’s Frank in particular is a strutting anachronism. For instance, when it is revealed that one of his competitors is a transexual — or planning to be — Frank riffs on the subject with a tiresome tirade of unreconstructed bigotry.
The author may have intended to reveal something about attitudes to inclusivity in the workplace, but the comments drag his play down to the level of a 1970s sitcom. And, granted, although much of what is said or done in this comedy seems silly or tediously unsophisticated at the time, they make much more sense in the light of the play’s late revelations.
The trouble is, by then it’s all a little too late. If Galceron had written characters we care about, and who say funny things under stress, the best of this play would have been enjoyed while watching it, rather than in retrospect.