I’d Like a Job Please | Get Your Coats On

“Satire so biting it’s like dipping your toes in a paddling pool of cartoon piranhas.”

Is it me or is there a dearth of jobs suitable for the graduates we produce? Clearly, it’s not just me since there is a show on this EdFringe that hits the nail squarely on the head. Here is a script that skewers the contemporary employment market with a satire so biting it’s like dipping your toes in a paddling pool of cartoon piranhas.

Sarah is a recent graduate, living at home, looking for a job. There isn’t much out there as the void said to the encompassing empty space an hour or two before the big bang. ‘Vacuous’ that is the word which springs to mind about the work available at the fuzzy end of the employment lollipop. BUT! Joy of joys, there’s an opening in an office (or is it a cult) pushing crappy products. There are downsides like terrible pay, life-sucking hours, and the nagging certainty that all you are doing is enriching crappy people sitting at the top of a broken pyramid. It’s a job doing zero social good and much societal harm.

Sarah hasn’t got much ambition beyond amassing a scintilla of self-respect. She shares existence with a cast of well-dodgy characters including toxic macho-hustler podcasters, carbon-copy women sapping the joy out of life with their singsong voices, and colleagues with less personality than the inside of a wet cardboard box. The only bright spot is Sarah’s mum whose sunny disposition is either totally naive or a lesson to us all.

Serious Billy Productions was founded three years ago by a group of University of Warwick students. Following sold-out productions at Warwick they have teamed up with Oxford Revue Alumni to develop ‘I’d Like A Job Please’. It’s obvious from the getgo that there is some serious talent under the hood of this Caterham Roadsport which, like its road-going automotive counterpart, is light, fast and occasionally furious.

There are some real highlights including the bizarre company away day as well as Sarah’s posh-adjacent friend’s horrible relationship with her horrible mother. This young company does grotesqueness like Gilray although not always with his joie de vivre. Fine satire admits the truth while seeing the possibilities however dim and uncertain. This is a generation with every reason to be angry that the economy is not simply a mess, it’s a beached, very dead whale carcass riddled with self-important wormish bloviators left high and dry by the tides of analogue, digital, and now AI-enhanced rushing up and down a polluted foreshore.

This is why there’s every reason to be positive, especially if you’re a supermart, superbright Russell Group graduate with a collective flair for real-world fantasy. Knowing that the rat race is a con is the first step on the road to a happy life. This is a cast-heavy production with a surprising lack of off-stage production going on. Where is the website? Where is the front of house work before curtain up? Where are the nuts and bolts a well-scaffolded production cannot do without? What’s on stage shows so much promise, but this unstretched canvas needs a frame and a focus so as to stand out from another very crowded market. It will be interesting to read their #EdFringeTalk25 10 months from now.

I hope that Serious Billy Productions will be returning and reflecting after this short run. They are ones to watch and they have something to say. Get your off-the-peg Next Sale work coats on and go see this!