work.txt (Modern Plays)

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Happy Meal is a big-hearted, funny romcom, showing love between trans people with a sharp script and great onstage chemistry. Read our full review. Photo: Lottie Amor Samuel Barnett's character's self-flagellating, frenetic, sense of humour is soon revealed to disguise a series of deep-rooted, unresolved traumas in an outrageously entertaining and endless surprising play. Read the full review here. Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic Say It Again, Sorry? present a delightfully interactive and uproariously funny take on Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. A feast for Fringe-goers of all levels of experience. Read the full review here. Photo: Dylan Silk Nathan Ellis is a writer for stage and screen. In 2020 his play Super High Resolution was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award run by the Soho Theatre, coming in the top six out of 1500 submitted plays. His plays include No One Is Coming to Save You (a 'blazing debut' (the Guardian), published by Oberon) and work.txt (**** the Guardian). In 2021, he made Still Life, a digital play series commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse. He has TV projects in development with Greenacre Films and Balloon Entertainment. He is represented by Giles Smart at United Agents and is based between London and Berlin. I do carry a notepad around. I think that’s a writer’s prerogative! But really all my best inspiration happens when I’m walking around and reading. I also find a lot of inspiration in seeing other people’s work – it’s incredibly helpful to spend time thinking about what I like and don’t like in other people’s art to try to hone my own craft. I find it particularly helpful to see theatre I don’t like very much; I’ve had some of my most exciting ideas while incredibly bored in an audience. Hopefully some writers will come and hate my play and write something brilliant as a result!

With creative yet simple staging, and a cyclical structure, Some Kind of Theatre's The Grandmothers Grimm makes for a bold and moving tribute to the overlooked and marginalised women present in the story of the Brothers Grimm. Read our full review here. Photo: Grant Jamieson Alongside its fast cars, dizzying theatrical devices and pounding beats, Common Wealth's Peaceophobia counters prejudice with stories of humour, passion, and belief. Read our full review here. Photo: Ian Hodgson Dykegeist @ Summerhall (★★★★) Do you think theatre is in a good place currently? What, if anything, do you think is missing from the art form? Sami Ibrahim's latest show is a captivating story depicting the callousness of our immigration system. Ultimately, the performances in Violent Burst... compose a powerful odyssey of both humour and moving sentiment. Read the full review here. Photo: Conor Jatter

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Preoccupied with the internal and external idiosyncrasies of the weather, this piece is slow, careful, quiet, rambling at times. As an audience member you are forced to slow down with it, and go where it's taking you. Read our full review here. Photo: Aidan Moseby It is easy to pass through things these days without asking ‘but who made this world?’ and it is becoming easier. The clatter of the restaurant kitchen recedes behind the delivery driver on the doorstep; the hands that made the clothes we wear move through the air in a country we may never see. So disconnected becomes time spent from thing made that the ‘hour selling’ in which most of us participate feels increasingly abstract. We no longer make most of our personal world nor have relationships with those who do. So obscured is the thing made that it becomes harder and harder to tell when we are working, and what it is we are working at. It opens with the usual Dublin Fringe Festival notice: welcome to the show, please take note of emergency exits and switch off mobile phones. Meanwhile, words are projected on to the wall of the theatre telling the audience to ignore the instructions and to leave their phones on. This sets the tone for the show, with the projection acting as a sort of all-seeing eye.

This Is Not A Show About Hong Kong lays bare the disturbing realities of life in a surveillance state – a vital and groundbreaking piece of work. Read our full review here. Photo: Tangle Photography

A surprisingly unimaginative audience participation take on work culture, which asks its audience to take a DIY approach to a night at the theatre. work.txt | Soho Theatre | Until 12 Mar 2022 The new show from Yann Coste and Sébastien Rambaud is a genuinely inventive hour of musical clowning – and a whole lot of drumming. Read our full review here. Photo: Nicolas Galloux I Am From Reykjavik @ Portobello Promenade (★★★★★) And rather good we are, too. Fed lines by an officious “chat function”, we become an online community mesmerised by a social media brand manager who, having been frozen in digital limbo, is now a viral sensation. People log on just to stare. If that wasn’t self-referential enough, there’s also a theatre director responding to these “unprecedented times” by showcasing “ordinary people doing nothing digitally”. Temping is a jewel-like show, elegantly paced with a constant flow of ‘work’, and, of course, slowly dawning revelations about office life, unexpected relationships, petty squabbles. But behind the mundane trivia of work lurk real lives and hopes – too easily snuffed out by your own complicity, and even by murkier activities that are only hinted at. There’s a limit to how far Dutch Kills can go before shattering the illusion they’ve so carefully created, so in many ways Temping is full of ideas that could be far more fully developed in an alternative format. Nonetheless, it’s a quietly moving, slightly unsettling, miniature masterpiece of a show.

It’s not quite as radical as all that, but it’s certainly an original format. The audience is instructed, via a semi-automated PowerPoint, what to say and do, with no cast to guide them but themselves. Berardi, Franco, “What Does Congnitariat Mean? Work, Desire and Depression.”, Cultural Studies Review, vol 11, issue 2, (2005), pg. 1. The audience read a projected text together out loud, with lines assigned by categories ("people with brown hair", "people who earn more than thirty thousand pounds a year"), follow instructions onstage and are fed lines by headphones as part of a collective, interactive experience. Nominated for an Innovation Award at VAULT Festival 2020, work.txt is written by Nathan Ellis who was previously a member of the Royal Court Invitation Writers' Supergroup 2018-19 and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award. Formally, the play recalls David Greig’s short two-hander Fragile in which the audience, reading from a screen, played one of the characters. Ellis, who has something of Greig’s ironic sense of humour, goes one step further by doing away with actors altogether. Probably not what Equity wants to hear right now, but the stars of this New Diorama theatre and Incoming festival production are us.By the time I read Graeber’s article, I’d already had this made pretty clear to me by work.txt, a performance which was on a surface level, and I think on its deepest level too, against this. But the way it operated was almost a mimicry of the ruling class position: it was a play in which I had no time on my hands in which to really consider exercising my autonomy. I felt like my job as an audience member-participant was of replication, not of creation – not even ancillary but arbitrary. In participating you become extremely aware of yourself as a maker of the world you inhabit, but you are not quite sure what this is in service of.

Look at Me Don’t Look At Me tells the story of a fierce, courageous woman, and asks questions about how we tell the stories of women from history. Read our full review. Photo: Sebastian HindsBesides which: it was a great piece of theatre. It was gripping, satisfying, discomforting, with an elusive glimmer of hope I couldn’t quite catch, but knew I would go on seeking. This one-woman monologue weaves a brutally unapologetic tapestry of a woman’s inner psyche. The polarisation of corporeal and mental suffering is devastating. Both are balanced perfectly; each sphere of her trauma is a planet revolving around her. Read our full review here. Photo: Lottie Amor It’s brilliantly executed and I look forward to reading people’s reactions to it online. After all it is a show about community. You actively want to come away and debrief with someone, to ask each other questions about the show, remember moments of genuine surprise and spontaneity. The title does it a disservice. Don’t be put off by it. It makes perfect sense when you’ve seen the show, but it doesn’t capture the incredibly joyous and fun experience on offer. In A Fairie Tale, Niall Moorjani seamlessly blends the threads of racial identity, queerness and folklore to create a fantastical and poignant picture of modern Scotland. Read the full review here. Photo: Niall Moorjani An adaptation of Ellis’s recent show work.txt, it mixes existential soul-searching with wry comedy, tempered by the quiet cry of a world yearning to reinvent itself.