THEATRE: CONTRACTIONS
“Emma thinks she’s in love. Her manager thinks she’s in breach of contract.”
Review by Duncan McLeod.
Director: Christine Greenough
Cast: Sarah Loxley and Viviana Delgado
Where: TAP GALLERY
When: October 19-23 Limited Season
Website: www.contractions2010.com
Review:
CONTRACTIONS was so unsettling I wanted to walk out. The quality of Mike Bartlett’s script was strong enough to have me feeling for both of our actors, despite the fact that one of them was being targeted and the other was doing the targeting. Politics and Romance are two words easily associated with ‘Office’. Barlett’s script puts both of these things under the microscope and sifts through their every nuance to deliver a narcissistic, ‘Big Brother’ piece that questions the definition of ‘Duty of Care’ and ‘Corporate Responsibility’ quite vividly.
Sarah Loxely as the ‘nameless faceless corporation’ representative is excellent. The audience has no choice but to loathe her character from the outset. This decision had this reviewing squirming in his seat, as her character poked and prodded at Emma’s (Viviana Delgado) private life and the details of her office romance were unravelled for the company’s records.
Delgado as Emma was great. Her portrayal as an the unassuming naïve corporate workhouse was engaging and emotive. Watching Emma be put through the proverbial ringer had this reviewer almost in the foetal position hearing her every detail about her perceived office romance laid bare. As the pressure became too much for Emma and she began to fray around the edges, Delgado took the audience on an emotional journey, that had the room in an unsettling silence for the most part of this well paced hour of dramatic theatre.
This piece also presented a modernised take on the ‘white-box’ design that was well thought out and served to position the characters in plausible surroundings.
Director Christine Greenough has done well to form this piece, using the space effectively and employing costuming to differentiate he scenes rather than distracting set changes. The staging itself is clever allowing the audience to focus more on the characters and their dialogue than rather than their movement.
As much as the piece wanted us to focus on the harsh treatment of Emma. This reviewer could have done with a little information on the nameless faceless woman known only as “your manager”. While Emma’s rhetoric could have been better written, she was right to desire some sort of emotion from her accuser. Only one of our characters explored their arc and it may have served the piece better if both had their own journey.
Regardless this is an an excellent piece of theatre that grabs the audience by the collective scruff and paints an unsettling picture of corporate life between friends acquaintances and lovers.
