work.txt (Modern Plays)

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There’s a way of participating in this play that would leave you feeling like you had completely torn apart the concept of work. That you, with your fellow audience members-turned-performers, had laboured in ways that were fun, productive, new. That was not the way I experienced it. For me, it was a precise and detailed answer to the question ‘how are we made to work without conscious intention or realisation?’, delivered by making me do work without conscious intention and only a slowly dawning realisation.

Temping is a jewel-like show, elegantly paced with a constant flow of ‘work’, and, of course, slowly dawning revelations about office life, unexpected relationships, petty squabbles. But behind the mundane trivia of work lurk real lives and hopes – too easily snuffed out by your own complicity, and even by murkier activities that are only hinted at. There’s a limit to how far Dutch Kills can go before shattering the illusion they’ve so carefully created, so in many ways Temping is full of ideas that could be far more fully developed in an alternative format. Nonetheless, it’s a quietly moving, slightly unsettling, miniature masterpiece of a show. Both types of writing are amazingly difficult to get right, but in different ways. Screenplays respond much better to fast plots and to visual language. Very basically, scenes are much longer in plays, and characters have to return more often, so they all need to be intensely distilled. But it’s also true that the basics of good dramatic writing carry across into screenwriting.This one-woman monologue weaves a brutally unapologetic tapestry of a woman’s inner psyche. The polarisation of corporeal and mental suffering is devastating. Both are balanced perfectly; each sphere of her trauma is a planet revolving around her. Read our full review here. Photo: Lottie Amor The artist clearly knows what she’s doing, this isn’t performative or dancelike – she’s building a house. With I Am From Reykjavik, Sonia Hughes manages to be at once open and closed, serene and defiant. Read our full review here. Photo: Solomon Hughes Finally, if you had to sell Super High Resolution to us in just a sentence or two, what would you say? He was born and lived in Hawaii, USA for a month, stopped by S. Korea to meet his family, then moved to China and lived there for around 7 years. He moved to S. Korea in winter when he was 8. (Weverse Q&A)

Since the start of the pandemic people have been feeling more disconnected, unsure of what to do, how to behave, and how to do small talk, so it is a relief to form a group with strangers without the pressure of actually having to invent anything. Unlike awkward audience participation where one has to improvise, here you can hide behind the lines that are already written for you. In A Fairie Tale, Niall Moorjani seamlessly blends the threads of racial identity, queerness and folklore to create a fantastical and poignant picture of modern Scotland. Read the full review here. Photo: Niall Moorjani This is what the late David Graeber outlines in an article for STRIKE!, writing that where technology was supposed to lessen our need to work, instead it ‘has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more.’ [4] The ancillary jobs that seem to spring up essentially to facilitate the act of more people doing more work are down to the fact that, as Graeber puts it, ‘The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger.’

work.txt

Do you think theatre is in a good place currently? What, if anything, do you think is missing from the art form? In a similar vein, don’t expect any conventional performers in Nathan Ellis’s very clever Work.txt( pictured above, picture by Guy Sanders) at Summerhall, but do expect to be doing quite a bit of a show’s work yourself. That might involve a bit of group reading, some solo microphone work, a few gentle construction activities, even a bit of lying on the floor. An adaptation of Ellis’s recent show work.txt, it mixes existential soul-searching with wry comedy, tempered by the quiet cry of a world yearning to reinvent itself. Work demands focus. It demands being at the right place, at the right time, wearing the right clothes, being in the right mindset. It feels like it’s really hard to do good work at a time of persistent strangeness and wrongness and uncertainty, when the structures that bring us together have been worn away. And the same is true of watching a performance. None of these details are for certain. Some are likely to recur from show to show, others will be totally unique to the moment. We learn and infer more about each other as we tell a story together. Our protagonist is Dan (who knows who yours will be). He stops working and an image of him lying on the ground captures the public imagination. We do our best to tell this story.

Emily Davis is a producer of theatre and live events. She is producer at Farnham Maltings and associate producer with Poltergeist Theatre who were named in the Guardian's 'best young theatre companies'. Recent credits include Ghost Walk by Poltergeist Theatre starring Juliet Stevenson and Paterson Joseph, work.txt and work.txt online, and i will still be whole (when you rip me in half) by Ava Wong Davies (**** The Stage). Nathan Ellis said, "I wrote the show as a sort of satire of the always-on, never-stopping work culture, and then the whole world stopped because of COVID. As the pandemic recedes, it's fascinating and depressing to see how the energy of just-getting-going-again is mirrored by the play. I hope work.txt asks big questions about why we're all working so hard, and if we can't imagine a different sort of relationship to work. The show is about community and working together and play - it literally doesn't happen without the audience, so I'm thrilled it's happening in-person again at the Soho Theatre. I'm excited to get to work." You’re currently developing some projects for TV and you are part of the BBC Drama Room. How differently do you approach a screenplay to a stage play? Writer Nathan Ellis seems well aware of the potential criticisms of the show. That’s sort of the problem really: The script is so self-aware that self-awareness is basically the protagonist, and the actual point is lost amongst knowing, wry quips. The script has predicted a variety of niggling reactions, at one point assigning a ‘cynical audience member’ a rant about how this isn’t real theatre, that they’d seen Mamma Mia The Musical just last week and “ that was proper theatre”. But self-awareness does not “proper theatre” make. Writer Nathan Ellis is a member of the BBC Drama Room and has several television projects in development. On stage he is known for his debut No One Is Coming to Save You as well as the critically acclaimed work.txt – a play without actors. Now under the direction of Blanche McIntyre, Soho Theatre will present the world premiere of Super High Resolution. The play, which focuses on the NHS, was shortlisted for the prestigious Verity Bargate Award, the judging panel of which included Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ellis took time out to speak with us about his latest theatrical offering.

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Alongside its fast cars, dizzying theatrical devices and pounding beats, Common Wealth's Peaceophobia counters prejudice with stories of humour, passion, and belief. Read our full review here. Photo: Ian Hodgson Dykegeist @ Summerhall (★★★★) His father is also a musician and released an album in 2007 called ‘Virtues In Us’ in both English and Chinese.

work.txt is going on tour internationally next year, Super High Resolution is being produced in German in Kassel in February. Alongside the screenwriting stuff, I’m also in the R&D phase of a new experimental play I am directing about surveillance capitalism and I am writing a new play about hiking. But this is the wrong question. Or at least, it’s a question that is easily answered: ‘because I do not know which work I should be doing.’ This leads to a better question: ‘what is the nature of the work that I am doing?’. Asking this helps us begin to answer the current beneath all these work-questions, ‘what is the work that I want to do?’. Alok Vaid-Menon blends vulnerability with humour in an unapologetic and defiant hour of performance. Read our full review here. Photo: Lottie Amor Note 2: Huening Kai updated his MBTI type to ISTP on June 12, 20 21 (Fansign). Beomgyu updated his MBTI to ISFJ on August 12, 2023 (Weverse live). It’s not quite as radical as all that, but it’s certainly an original format. The audience is instructed, via a semi-automated PowerPoint, what to say and do, with no cast to guide them but themselves.Work.txt is a show about work in which the audience do all (well… most of) the work. Only they tread the boards as there are no actors; following instructions projected on the wall, communicated over headphones or printed out onto a script. They build the set, read lines and act out what needs acting out together (if they are okay with that), alone (if they volunteer) or just as witnesses (if they prefer) to the others, the interplay between audience and screen, and to the light show and music, aided by an atmospheric haze machine.