In the late 1800s, Frederick Winslow Taylor set about codifying the labour of the workforce in the paper mill and steel industries. His analysis, published in The Principles of Scientific Management, was designed to extract maximum yield from what became known as a human resource. The philosophy of Taylorism ushered in a thankless era of management exploitation.
Throw in a bit of computer knowhow and the logical result of this managerialism is Person Spec, an initially daft and ultimately disturbing one-woman show that you would call dystopian if it were not so crushingly familiar.
The entertaining conceit of Andy Owen Cook’s play is that the audience are recruitment reps for the Zantion company (slogan: “Become the CEO of your own life”) and it is our job to put the latest candidate through her paces. We are fed our lines from a screen, in the manner of David Greig’s Fragile and Nathan Ellis’s work.txt, the graphics brilliantly realised in 90s retro style by a team of video designers streaming pixelated graphics and glitchy connections.
Alfie Heffer’s production starts off in computer-says-no territory as we enter a binary landscape where there are only right and wrong answers. The system is programmed to mispronounce the name of Marion, the luckless candidate, however much she protests.
Played by Inés Collado, Marion understands the game she has been asked to play. She believes there are correct answers to the relentless questions, answers that will show her to be the ideal employee. She will be a team worker, efficient, compliant and eager to please. Willing to participate in the interests of the system, she knows the expected goal: to end up like her namesake, a modern-day Marianne, leading the French republic from the front.
But Collado expertly shows how such an aim can come only at the expense of her human vulnerability. She is ready to comply, but hopelessly at sea. We recognise her ambition but we feel her distress as the computer’s questions morph from the comically surreal into frightening scenarios about corporate responsibility.
The deeper her sense of Kafka-esque futility, the more uncomfortable becomes our compliance. By the end, we are part of the very system we thought we were satirising.
At Alphabetti theatre, Newcastle, until 18 March.
