CONTRACTIONS | STAGE PREVIEW
You might be reading this on your phone inbetween checking your inbox for that ‘one last thing’ email from your boss, or sitting at work wondering if your furtive browsing is attracting attention from your colleagues.
If so, you’ll sympathise with Emma, whose personal affairs are becoming inseparable from her working ones. Affairs in the literal sense: Emma’s seeing her co-worker Darren. But there’s some friction with the boss, who isn’t too keen on office relationships, and whose demands are becoming quite unreasonable.
Mike Bartlett, who won an Olivier Award for his only slightly more outré offering, Cock, wrote his one-act play Contractions (he’s good at the provocative titles) to examine the closing gap between our public and private lives. It’s a dark satire starring Sara Lloyd-Gregory who plays the title character in S4C drama Alys and was seen recently as a troubled survivor of childhood abuse in Hinterland.
The play is fast and brutal but still endearingly clever, with compelling performances from the two leads as women caught up in a corporate culture that no longer has time for the vagaries of intimacy and rewards lethal efficiency above all else.
words LUKE WEBBER
Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, Sat 5-Tue 15 Mar, 8pm (also 2.30pm on Tue 15 Apr). Tickets: £14/£12 conc. Info: 029 2030 4400 / www.chapter.org
