"Bureaucracies". Pilch

The marketing blurb says, 'Bureaucracies is about corporate culture, drawing on real-life experiences to explore the absurdities, frustrations, and humour of modern working life.' It sounds like a slightly predictable satire on management consulting, doesn't it? A collection of gags about corporate buzzwords that people found funny fifty years ago.

But Bureaucracies is anything but lame satire. It's a dark, dirty assault on the human soul. Innocent Scouse office-worker Brian walks into a new job, and once he's in, he can never get out - literally. He's trapped in the room, he's given a computer, and no one ever tells him what he's supposed to do with it. His two bosses, middle manager Andrea and her superior Jim, cajole, bully and flatter him until he's little more than a nervous pile of jelly wobbling at his desk.

All I can say is, if this truly draws on first-time playwright Aidan Kane's real-life experiences, then his working conditions were several rungs below those of Winston Smith. Abuse, manipulation, and - somewhere in the background - nameless bosses whose motivations are never revealed, place Bureaucracies more in an Orwellian nightmare than a modern workplace. It's like Severance meets The Birthday Party in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Alongside the horror of Brian's daily grind, there is in fact a lot of dark humour in this play. Much of this comes from the monstrously un-self-aware manager Jim (Thomas Perry hitting all the notes of a man who hates his life only a little bit more than he hates everyone else's). A dark progeny of David Brent, he claims to be Brian's best pal and boss at the same time. Absurdity drips from him like office saliva: 'A donut is my way of showing I'm human'. 'There's an extent to which the line is just a line.' 'What do cats do? They HANG IN THERE.' Our laughter is laced with dread, and it has to be the most uncomfortable donut I've ever seen eaten on a stage. Simple pastry becomes an instrument of psychological warfare.

It's hard to escape the suspicion that what we're looking at here is an infinite rat cage. Brian is the rat being observed by Andrea; the two of them are rats being observed by Jim; all three are being watched by someone else (us perhaps?); and so it goes on, a system of interrogation, surveillance and subjugation, the meaning of which no one knows and no one dares ask, for fear of losing their job. And that's life. 

As Brian, Sonny Fox is both grovelling for praise and desperate for freedom. And Alex Coupland as middle manager Andrea is a conflicted cauldron of company loyalty and personal despair. Despite the fact that all they are doing for most of the two hours is sitting at a desk, typing and talking, the power games and bullying know no bounds. And the deliberately simplistic set - three chairs and a table - gradually starts to feel more like a torture chamber than a workplace. Joelle Lee's sound design, all distant beeps and hums, intensifies the sense of being swallowed by a vast, impersonal system. Welcome, my son, to the Machine.

Is two hours a bit long? Perhaps. Brian's progress towards the Holy Grail of Employee of the Month comes at the price of a crescendo of Kafkaesque mind control, in which repetition overplays its part to a degree. Even as Brian tumbles into the seventh level of office hell, accompanying him every step of the way does cause the play to lose some momentum. (But I guess, when poor Aidan Kane was going through it himself, it must have seemed even longer.) 

Strangely, the one thing missing from this play is any actual bureaucracy. Perhaps that's because the title is a pun. What we've watched is a collection of Bureau Crises.