‘Appraisal’ (Venue 45, until AUG 28th)

“There is so much sympathy, a wealth of similar lived experiences, that Bull’s unpulled punches often land not so much with a collective cry of pain as a collective groan of mutual support.”

You are cordially invited to a bear baiting. The bear, Jo the line manager, is to be found practising golf shots in his office when his opponent, Nicky, enters for her annual workplace appraisal. What follows is an hour’s worth of savage entertainment as the two battle with wits and words. Jo is not just a bear, he is a dinosaur. There’s no phone or laptop on his desk. Just a bottle of Scotch in the top drawer. He’s into power for power’s sake. He lacks vision. He lacks empathy. He lacks everything but a red in tooth and claw survival instinct. He’s every over-promoted snotrag festering in every uncollapsed hierarchy, devoid of any real values or value.

Nicky, by contrast, is good at what she does and she’s been doing it for eleven years. She simply wants to be left alone to get on with her job. She doesn’t want any more responsibility. She does wish that Jo’s sole passion, office politics and rivalries, would stop upsetting her work/life balance. Jo has an agenda for today’s appraisal and, together, Nicky and the audience must try to figure out what he’s up to.

Angela Bull, as Nicky, plays to the crowd. There is so much sympathy, a wealth of similar lived experiences, that Bull’s unpulled punches often land not so much with a collective cry of pain as a collective groan of mutual support. Bull is the everyperson who has had to deal with Jo’s universal brand of narcissistic manipulation. As the play builds to it’s snappy crescendo, Bull piles on the pressure, nimbly sidestepping the bombardment from on high to give as good as she gets.

Fringe treasure Tim Marriot, as Jo, studiously avoids playing the pantomime villain. As the writer also, Marriot knows what makes Jo tick and how to reveal each flaw and defect to best advantage. This is not Marriot’s homage to Gordon Britas, this is an infinitely deeper, more tragic individual all too human, vulnerable, and painfully self-aware. There are moments when one might wish that Marriot’s preference for understatement was either sharper or bolder to make his meaning clearer. A thinking and cerebral player, sometimes we could wish for more Vinney Jones from Marriot and less Colin Veitch.

The office worker as a species is under threat of extinction. The halcyon landscape to which Nicky harks back, of jobs for life and quiet efficiency, was shaken in the decades prior to lockdown working. Soon they will be gone, replaced by portfolio careers and the gig economy. One can imagine future generations mining this rich, but exotic seam in the human experiance, struggling to comprehend how so much human potential was wasted in pursuit of so little. Long, drawn-out workdays adding ever more to the deadweight of meetings and processes. How did people stand it?

I recently had a meeting in a plum orchard, which is about as corporate as I get. It was harvest time so we picked while we talked, sustained by the occasional overripe fruit. It was bliss. Can you imagine that people would rather hold their meetings in ugly offices, surrounded by pointless paper, spouting pompous gibberish? A better, more spiritually sustaining existence is possible than the dower, dowdy world of commutes and offices, EdFringe is proof of that. Jo is a dinosaur so perhaps Nicky is the wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, the early mammal who will survive the COVID meteor’s impact and freely evolve into something better than a roaring, slavering, bully with a walnut-sized brain. Here’s hoping.

Come for two Fringe favourites doing big things in a small world. Stay for the tragi-comic reminder of how bloody awful office life is. Get your sensible work coats on and go see this!