Reviewer: Christine Stanton
Writer: Rob Drummond
Director: Robert Softley Gale
“Wickedly Humorous“
4.5 / 5
The year is 2037 – Chris, an ex-police officer, was forced to give up her job and start taking benefits when she was diagnosed with OPMD; a condition that made her eyesight and muscles progressively weaken. She’s infuriated that she has to depend on the Government’s ridiculous WorkPay scheme and is dreading her appointment this afternoon to ‘prove’ her deteriorating condition is just as bad as she said it was on the copious amount of forms she filled out previously.
Presenting herself on her worst day, Chris (Gillian Dean) quickly messes up the flat and scrubs off her make-up in an attempt to prove to Ralph that she isn’t fit for work, hating the lengths she has to go to in order to be believed about the excruciating pain she experiences daily. Ralph (Neil John Gibson) is a huge advocate of the new system, robotic like in his exclamations of positive reinforcements about the process, smugly and blanketly repeating “we listened to your feedback” to any of the obstacles that Chris highlights as potential issues – proving her point that disabilities are all lumped under the same umbrella, rather than each individual case being taken into consideration. He flags the potentials of people trying to ‘game the system’ and keenly takes note as her Able device mentions she’s moving 15% slower than she normally does.
What follows in the first act is an interrogation of sorts about Chris’s abilities and options open to her if she passes the assessment, and therefore deemed able to go back to full time employment. Ralph is horrendously patronising – creating some wonderfully biting, back and forth dialogue between the duo that highlights a scope of issues in the process. He humiliatingly asks her to perform a short dance to ‘prove’ she can move and is quick to jump on any contradictions within her claims in an attempt to ‘catch her out’ and follow his orders to the letter. The interrogation gets more infuriatingly awful (in a good way!) as the show proceeds, and it’s almost impossible not to react to the sheer audacity of some of the shocking interactions. The intense first act comes to a thrilling close and the second act thankfully holds just as much outrageous brilliance as the first.
Writer Rob Drummond has created this wonderfully dystopian dark-comedy that scathingly puts a spotlight on the current accessibility issues that many face in and around the U.K. already. Automatically grabbing the attention of the audience is the huge flat screen TV on stage – featuring Emery Hunter as the on-screen BSL interpreter who remains signing throughout the show. In addition to this, the script is captioned above the stage, and Able (Richard Conlon) serves as an Alexa style gadget in Chris’s accessibly teched-out living room, who provides audio description throughout the show, and is hilarious with his scenes in the second act. It’s wonderful having such fantastic representation on the stage worked into the narrative so seamlessly. Helping to amplify the tension and suspense, is the wonderful lighting (Grant Anderson) and design (Kenneth Macleod) that sets the atmosphere and dials up the intensity throughout.
This is such a unique show with a excellent premise. The script is fast-paced and wickedly humorous, with the actors working fantastically to deliver each scathing line or satirical observation perfectly.
Runs Until 19 April 2024
Photo Credit: Andy Catlin
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