“This grippingly entertaining show carries the audience on a journey from a chirpy domestic comedy to a dark lockdown WFH psychodrama with a superb central performance from Paul Keating as the fragile housebound bureaucrat.”

Editorial Rating: 5 Stars (Outstanding)

I’m always on the look-out for new writing at the Fringe, so spotting posters and flyers for this one-man show with a picture of a cactus on them drew me to the Drawing Room at the Assembly Rooms on George Street. The size of the queue waiting to go in suggested that many others had the same idea. It soon became clear that this audience had been doing their homework. Clive is the latest work from writer Michael Wynne, who won the Olivier Award for Best New Comedy in 2010 for his play Priory. The solo performer in the show we were about to see is Paul Keating, an actor with a film, television, and theatre rap sheet as long as your arm and a two-time Olivier nominee himself.

The play is a dark comedy about working from home (WFH), the phenomenon that millions of us became abruptly familiar with during the Covid lockdowns a few years ago. Director Lucy Bailey’s production is eminently watchable, with a deceptively simple white set dominated by the eponymous Clive – the large green potted cactus from the posters. This is the flat of Thomas, a likeable and gregarious office worker now transplanted to his home and cheerfully making the best of his new circumstances.

With his previous social life now reduced to Zoom meetings with colleagues and managers, Thomas fills his day with innocent displacement activities involving some entertainingly performed household chores, gazing out of his window to watch similarly house-bound workers coping with their own domestic confinement, and the excitement of doorstep deliveries and taking in parcels for his neighbours.

From the beginning, we’re drawn in to Thomas’s world as he shares confidences with a cheerfully chatty demeanour. He makes himself comfortable with the help of Alexa, the virtual voice-activated computer assistant, whom he uses to create mood lighting to vary the ambience around his workspace. The practical realities of WFH are wryly parodied by Thomas dressing for work from the waist up in a Zoom-friendly office shirt, whilst spending the day barefoot and trouserless.

But all too soon the cheerfully comedic adventure of WFH takes on a darker claustrophobic tone. Is there something obsessive-compulsive about Thomas’s constant cleaning? Will his relationships with his co-workers survive the isolation of Zoom? Was he really the life and soul of office social life we thought he’d been? The lack of human contact in this new virtual environment quickly lays bare the seemingly toxic undercurrents that were once concealed by the protective veneer of civilised society. Even the Clive the cactus becomes a sinister looming presence.

This grippingly entertaining show carries the audience on a journey from a chirpy domestic comedy to a dark lockdown WFH psychodrama with a superb central performance from Paul Keating as the fragile housebound bureaucrat.

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