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A recruitment company for recruitment companies is the dreary setting for Daniel Andersen’s new comedy, and it’s not the sort of place you’d want to hang out in for very long.
The play takes place over a single day at financial recruitment firm Saxon Court during the financial crash of 2011. Protesters are clamouring outside, the toilet is covered in shit, the cleaner has gone AWOL and the boss isn’t happy. At all.
Saxon Court owner Donna (Debra Baker) is a hard-as-nails business woman who may call everyone ‘love’ and ‘gorgeous’, but who looks ready (and able) to bite off any of her workforce’s lazy hands. She needs to fire someone to keep things afloat. Who that will be changes several times over the course of a day of revelations and a booze-heavy Christmas party.
The performances are pretty watchable, especially Baker, Sophie Ellerby as angry-faced worker Nat and Alice Franklin as the put-upon secretary, who all bring emotional depth to their roles. And there’s certainly pace to Andersen’s debut, but ‘Saxon Court’ gets too caught up in bitchy in-fighting and funny one-liners and emerges as something of a soap. Though the protesters do impinge on the action, there’s no palpable connection between what’s going on inside the office and what’s happening in the rest of the world. The company is suffering because of the crash, but you can’t help but feel that Donna’s problems started a long time before that – like when she began running the place with such alienating ruthlessness and hiring such a bunch of idiots.
The main problem, though, is that it’s just really hard to like the characters. Several of them swerve from nice to downright disgusting – including star worker Joey who moves from unhappy husband to sex-pest.
By the end, Donna’s vitriolic speeches about the crowds outside St Paul’s and her dubious business morals make it hard for us to see her as anything other than a messed-up money-focused madame, who deserves everything she gets.