Erin Harrington reviews Indian Ink’s touring production of Dirty Work at the Isaac Theatre Royal, Friday 28 July 2023.
Can you make art about the cyclical drudgery of office work – or, perhaps, most work – that isn’t fundamentally dystopian? Indian Ink’s charming production Dirty Work: Ode to Joy, which is set in the New Zealand branch of an Indian-based multinational Sisyphus International, certainly thinks so. It takes a different route than the many creative works that have found rich material in the ways work might treat people as units of labour, not individuals with lives, hopes and desires. Some of the award-winning company’s best productions, including Krishnan’s Dairy and The Pickle King, have foregrounded people’s relationships to work and workplaces in their serio-comic explorations of love, identity, and meaning. In this production we follow the story of a cleaner stuck in the middle of an office crisis. Here, the meaningless, repetitive shuffle of work is framed as something that might be a source of rich contentment, even joy.
The wide, deep stage of the Isaac Theatre Royal is transformed cleverly into a brightly-coloured office environment. In John Verryt’s delightful set design, clusters of trestle tables become office cubicles whose partitions are spray painted in high contrast, child-like colours. Potted plants and colourful bins are scattered about the place. Three large curtains, painted with giant stylised windows, hang behind. It’s very effective, especially as the room seems to hover in an inky darkness.
It’s early in the day, and a cleaner (Catherine Yates) – whose name isn’t disclosed until later in the show – is working her way through the office, wiping down desks and removing various strata of old lunch wrappers and caked-on yoghurt. Her false teeth and stylised way of moving and speaking will be familiar to those who’ve seen Indian Ink shows before. Neil (Justin Te Honihana Pokaihau Rogers), an almost cartoonishly cheerful (although only moderately competent) middle manager, arrives early. He disturbs the cleaner, then discovers the computers have all been removed to be upgraded. Panic is barely subdued by the entrance of Neil’s restless co-worker (and crush) Zara (the beautifully-voiced Tessa Rao), who is still working here because Covid thwarted her plans to travel the world. Enter their colleagues: a couple of dozen game members of a local choir who have learned the music for tonight’s show but who don’t know the script, and who will act throughout as a chorus of workers as well as singers. It’s very neat conceit, and the singers are all acknowledged by name as vital members of Neil’s (and the show’s) team.
In the midst of the muddle, Vijay Kumari (voiced by co-writer and company founder Jacob Rajan), the big boss in Bangalore, skypes in like God checking in on his subjects. After a hiccup in India, he demands that the New Zealand office do the impossible: prepare the entire company’s accounts, manually, in a matter of hours for a board meeting. As Neil (a true company man) rallies the troops the cleaner gets caught up in the escalating chaos, and stuck between the needs of her family and those of the company.
Rajan and writer / director Justin Lewis’s script is playful, foregrounding broad physical comedy, great sight gags, and deft wordplay. There’s a clear and pleasing visual language on display, and strong performances. We have warmth and humour, but also pathos, especially in moments where Zara’s egalitarian streak is revealed to be a pretence. The cleaner’s dignity is challenged by a workplace that tells her she’s essential, but treats her as disposable. Nonetheless, it’s a feel-good show. Throughout, the choir offers riffs on classical and pop music from New Zealand and India, the arrangements and delivery impeccably shaped by MD Josh Clark and choir manager Luke Baker. I don’t doubt that it’s a terrific experience for the choir, and I appreciate the sense of warm collaboration – as well as the production’s final, satisfying moments.
In naming the company Sisyphus, the show’s creators nod overtly to Albert Camus’ 1942 essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which articulates Camus’ philosophy of the absurd: the contradiction that exists when our deep-seated human need to find meaning in life rams into the universe’s silent indifference. The essay closes with an exploration of the Greek legend of Sisyphus, a man who cheated Death. His punishment is an eternity of fruitless labor: to try roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to have to roll back down each time it neared the top. Camus’ philosophy is not nihilistic, but suggests that in embracing the absurd we might be content in the struggle, in the act of living itself, not it its (lack of) inherent meaning. His famous conclusion: “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”.
I really love the application of these ideas to performance, although by the end – and it is truly a warm and satisfying end – I am unsure what the show’s take on work, work work, actually is. This is a question the production itself explicitly invites. Programme notes comment on Camus’ work, and also recent research on the profound extent of workplace unhappiness. This framing sets up one conversation, but this show delivers another.
Watching Neil find his groove in middle management while attempting to fulfil the impossible demands of his boss makes me wonder if the point this show is making is that we’re all just individual hamsters on individual wheels, all finding our individual sweet spots? I don’t know, and I honestly hope not. A confession: I too gain a remarkable sense of clarity and wellbeing from inbox zero, and a feeling of achievement from sniffing documents fresh from the printer. But there’s something more profound and difficult that’s being deflected in this production. Perhaps I have been watching too much Succession, and reading too much Mark Fisher. Through the cheerful musical numbers and the satisfied sense of productivity I can’t help but think of the appalling impact of the internalisation of neoliberal logic on our collective psyches, and the devastation of the sorts of mass layoffs that are held up here as a threat.
The show does overtly engage with issues of class and entrenched inequity. A large part of its evergreen message is that you don’t punch down and you don’t fuck with the cleaner. It’s telling, and ironic, that the only person big boss Kumari seems to respect is the one person who’s not running numbers for him – but only because the cleaner reminds him of his mum, and is thus the one human in a sea of drones.
This means that there is a clear difference in this production between thankless yet perhaps(?) satisfying(?) manual labour like cleaning (as well as work that you can separate from your personal and emotional lives) and the bland white-collar work of an office. Endless meaningless “there is no alternative” requests for reports and papers and forecasts hang high. Inhuman corporate slogans are steeped in the ever-present threat of restructuring. FYI: the cold clammy hand of the market is not your friend. There’s a reason why corporate and civic bureaucracy is often used in works about purgatory, conformity, or worse. It’s a perversely romantic notion, given how poorly cleaners are paid and treated. It’s also one I find unsettling, even if we do recognise the many ways “Ode to Joy”, a recurring motif, has been used as a protest anthem.
We can acknowledge the dignity of workers without valourising work. Precarity doesn’t go away just because you get a couple of hours to yourself. I do genuinely enjoy the show – and judging by overheard conversations afterwards, so does the large and enthusiastic audience – but I also wonder if Sisyphus ever thought about joining a union.
Dirty Work is currently touring New Zealand. More information on the show is available here.
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