JOB

A young woman holds a gun on a man.  Blackout.  And the same again, slightly different.  Blackout.  And again.  What we’d call ‘flash cuts’ in the movies.  That’s how JOB begins – establishing itself as a thriller – a hostage situation. 

Lights up and the young woman, Jane (Jessica Clarke) is shakily holding the gun on an understandably frightened and bewildered man, Lloyd (Darren Gilshenan).  Despite this introduction, Jane has come so that Lloyd, a therapist chosen by her employer, can give her a mental assessment. That’s so that she can return to her job with a huge media company (unnamed but we can guess) after a major panic attack that went viral.  She has it on her phone.

Jane stows the gun in her holdall, but theatregoers all know the Chekhov rule about firearms...  Jane’s job was in what’s called ‘user care’: later we learn she had to watch and take down horrific, malicious, violent posts – murder, torture, child abuse, every sadistic spectacle imaginable.  Some of these she describes in vivid detail.  We shudder at what she’s seen, and we wonder how anyone can do that job day after day. 

And yet, she insists, she is desperate to get back to her job, which she regards as some kind of higher calling.  She tries to convince Lloyd of the necessary sacrifices she makes for the common good.  It is this ambiguity, this ambivalence that is central to JOB and the most interesting aspect of it.  Jane has been driven to perpetual existential panic by her job, but she must get back to it.  So, she pleads and threatens Lloyd – who, of a naturally kindly nature, is concerned – despite his fear - only to help this troubled soul.

I would not be the first to compare JOB to an episode of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror – although episodes of Black Mirror are shorter, cleaner and clearer.  The problem with JOB is not Nadia Tass’s brisk direction that maintains a sense of danger and claustrophobia throughout, nor with David Parker’s lighting – which involves some pretty tricksy stuff, nor with Daniel Nixon’s sound design that goes beyond atmosphere.  All those things, plus two excellent performances, hold the play together, grip the audience, and just about disguise the fact that the problem is Max Wolf Friedlich’s text.

And the performances are excellent.  It’s a pleasure to see Darren Gilshenan play a ‘normal’ (normal is key here, by contrast) kind, middle-aged man reminding us of what a fine actor he is. 

Jessica Clarke, meanwhile, gives us another layered performance; she must sustain someone in the grip of a panic attack all the way through – and she does this superbly at visible cost.  Even when her Jane calms down – a little – and conducts near normal conversation – Clarke never lets us forget that Jane is suffering deeply from something she does not understand - that she is on the edge, and dangerous to herself and others.  Jane’s grip on reality is both tenuous and sickening (from what she’s seen) and the omnipresence of her paranoid imagination is suggested to us by sudden harsh noises, flashing lighting changes and hallucinations in which Lloyd is suddenly a monster...

Friedlich has a lot on his mind - perhaps too much – to do with the modern world of the internet and the trap of pernicious social media – but despite the awards and accolades and its transfer from Off-Broadway to Broadway’s Hayes Theatre, the play is rather muddled, gimmicky and circular – like some obviously manipulative television tropes. 

We can’t change channels, but Friedlich still needs the ‘hook’ of the gun.  The jeopardy for the hostage.  There are the added reasons why Jane is desperate and deranged.  But perhaps most fatal to the play’s real and intelligent concerns is Friedlich’s addition of a ‘twist’ that takes over almost completely – at least, apparently, in the bulk of the audience’s minds.  This ‘twist’ can be no more than yet another of Jane’s paranoid delusions – logically it makes no sense at all – and yet the audience is clearly intended to be gripped by the sudden upping of the ante – and the gun comes out of the holdall again...  

JOB is definitely worth seeing.  Minus the gimmicks, what it has to say about technology’s grip is insightful and disturbing and – as noted – there are those two wonderful performances.

Michael Brindley     

Photographer: Sarah Walker.