Paperweight

Somewhere in an anonymous office for an unnamed company, two resource workers struggle to maintain a sense of dignity and individuality.

One drinks from a Che Guevara mug and over-rides protocol to assist neglected customers; the other decorates his desk with toys, plays practical jokes and pines for an unseen colleague.

Paperweight follows these two characters through a day in their working lives, showing the dehumanising effect that office work can have on the soul. It is a devised production, created between director Jamie Wood and actors Tom Frankland and Sebastien Lawson.

Frankland and Lawson are both very good performers. They give their characters enough humanity to be sympathetic but are also abstract in a cartoonish way, allowing for performances that ring true without being too realistic. It is obvious that they have done their research on office life as everything, from computer etiquette to tea breaks, feels believable.

But as is the case with a lot of devised work, the production’s script is rather hit-and-miss. It has a segmented structure, meaning that events that occurred five minutes previously have little relevance to what happens next, resulting in much of the action becoming quickly forgettable. And even though it has its heart in the right place, the piece is also a bit self-indulgent – another easy trap for devised work to fall into.

As for the production, it is a very polished piece of theatre. The workers’ shenanigans are evenly paced along with tedious paperwork, and the production make rather creative use of the set, which proves to be much more complicated than one assumes at first glance.

It isn’t nearly as clever or original as it thinks it is, but Paperweight still has much more to say on the current corporate climate than most artistic work. It’s an enjoyable piece of theatre, even though one has seen most of it before.