Written Freya Lewis
THE WORLD HAS CHANGED, BUT SOPHIA IS DESPERATE TO MAINTAIN NORMALITY. SO WHEN THE CARROT IS DANGLED, SHE GRABS IT – IF THINGS CAN GO BACK TO HOW THEY WERE.
This year, Mike Heath brings us a corporate comedy, inspired by Erving Goffman’s Total Institution. The play debuts in Stockport’s Studio Salford, as a product of Viaduct Theatre, fronting Stockport’s independent theatre scene.
Directed by Leni Murphy and starring Antonio Whitehead, Greg Kelly, John Tuert, and Helen O’Hara, this Maureen O’Neil produced piece explores the entrapment of our corporate world, and how this can stifle identity.
After five years of development, ‘Playing God’ has shifted from a devised rehearsal room project to being granted ‘Arts Council’ funding and into a fully-fledged play. The team aim to communicate the themes and situations that creeping corporation leads us to in our everyday working lives.
Mike Heath said: “The piece explores the way in which we’re sleepwalking into a corporate world that is subtly eroding our rights – the spin, and the corporate bullshit that has invaded our verbal palette, reducing the individual into a number who no longer has human needs.”
The painful resonation is sure to hit home, as a happy workforce are forced into change my a mystery take over of their company by a powerful company. It explores the blind acceptance to corporate regime that erodes identity and understanding of the world around them in a workplace context.
The play explores how corporation has changed our lives. However the narrative also explores physical comedy in a dark context. The fun that Heath clung onto during production creates an articulate black comedy that may be just a little too close to home.
‘Playing God’ seems to promise a treat for the working classes in a beautiful, arguably Marxist production that explores what most of those working have probably thought about before.
Playing God runs from Wednesday 28th February until Saturday 3rd March 2018 at the HatWorks Museum, Wellington Mill, SK3 0EU.