Work monopolises our lives. Even if you do manage to just work the requisite eight hours a day, it’s still most of your waking day and maybe you get the weekend off, but then there’s the Sunday scaries: getting worked up about Monday morning. And if you can’t switch your brain off, is eight plus eight plus eight really the best division of our time?
Penny meets
Flux at work. Penny has been there a long time and Flux has only just begun.
Penny is keen to get Flux up to speed, because she’s been struggling since the
redundancies of last year. Flux isn’t really used to working full time, so they
find it difficult to be on time and stay motivated. Slowly, over days that all
feel the same, the two colleagues start to open up to each other.
Penny has a
child, who is demanding on several fronts. Penny never takes a sick day. Flux
has a partner – “your boyfriend is a lesbian?” Penny asks, unable to fathom it –
and with this job they are able to save money for the first time. Flux is planning
to have time off soon and isn’t opposed to taking a mental health day,
something Penny doesn’t understand at all.
Day after
day, the two come together, stuck with each other for hours at a time, in a job
that is both repetitive and somehow surprising and they start to find common
ground.
It is
tempting to describe Jean Tong’s new play, Do Not Pass Go, as a satire:
a comedy about the repetitiveness of work and the drudgery of existence where
days bleed into one another and even the most conscious of us fall into
patterns of behaviour we can’t escape. But that description feels reductive.
Tong’s writing is tapping into something much larger.
Jacob
Battista’s set is made up of white-panelled walls and floating ceilings. One
way in or out. Two work benches. Two stainless-steel sets of drawers. And
boxes, so many boxes. It’s a liminal space like the TV show Severance,
but where that show’s mystery centres on the kind of work the characters are
doing, here the work is nonsensical. Meaningless.
Harrie Hogan’s
lighting defaults to stark white, but the transitions are something else –
waves of darkness start to encroach but a later change in the colour palette is
bracing. Marco Cher’s sound design is occasionally disrupting, but mostly underlines
the dread of repetition.
Tong’s text
is in good hands with the duo of Belinda McClory and Ella Prince. We’re slowly introduced
to this classic odd couple in a series of mundane conversations that we all
might expect to find ourselves inside when we start a new job or meet a new
colleague. It’s both tentative and probing. The laughs are inherent in exposing
their differences and their life experiences.
McClory’s
Penny is pointed in her questions – her clipped dialogue in contrast to Prince’s
more fluid Flux, who wends their way around to a point. They bounce off each
other in an enticing, vigorous way to begin with but eventually the friendly interrogations are harder to answer and more difficult for the other person to fully
comprehend.
There are big questions in Do Not Pass Go about the necessity of working to live and the cycles that capitalism is happy for us to get stuck in. But more essentially, the play is about connection and finding common ground with the people we spend so much of our lives with. It’s ultimately about our humanity and what tests our self-belief.
Director Katy
Maudlin knows when to keep things firing and when to throttle down to an almost excruciating
slowness. As the play progress, the tone gradually changes to something harder to pin down. Satire is gone. Profundity has joined the chat.
That tonal shift is seismic. Do Not Pass Go finds the epic in the intimate. It knows better than to tell us what we all know – we work too much, and reaches toward us figuring out what to do with that knowledge. It’s extraordinary.
- Keith Gow, Theatre First
Do Not Pass Go is playing at the Lawler Theatre until March 28
Photos: Pia Johnson
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