Writer: Jack Parris
An intriguing satire of office culture and the rapacious need for promotion, Jack Parris’ 60-minute comedy-musical, The Unstoppable Rise of Ben Manager, is a rare blend of Kafka and science fiction with a touch of J.G. Ballard thrown in. Brilliantly capturing the sense of imposter syndrome, the monotony, incomprehensible nature and hierarchies of professional administration, Parris’ tale pokes fun at the nonsense of corporate speak and disingenuous worker strategies but in getting its character to the top of his organisations, starts to lose sight of its SMART objectives.
Attending an interview at a big company, Ben Weaver is stopped in his tracks by a dead body on the pavement outside the building and a mysterious woman tending to the corpse. Compelled to take the deceased man’s lanyard, he immediately morphs into super hireable Ben Manager who aces the interview, gets promoted very quickly and is invited to spend time on the executive floor.
Setting the scene is what The Unstoppable Rise of Ben Manager does best of all, skewering the fake bonhomie of most workplaces with their hollow attempts to support employee wellbeing and improve morale while underneath, Parris suggests, it’s all about productivity and distracting “the slugs” from the meaningless of their lives and of work itself. From a song filled with humorous acronyms recognisable to anyone with experience in administration to the comical emptiness of talk about compliance, policies and corporate phrases like “gaining traction” which becomes a song title, Parris has a sharp eye for the ridiculousness of how we interact at work and the serious behaviours we adopt in front of our colleagues.
The emerging sci-fi tone is also well handled, starting with an impression of personality change evoked by the Ben Manager lanyard, the increasingly ominous puppet co-worker, Derp, who morphs into a tempting devil and the demonic voice of Ben’s unseen manager, all drawing him inevitably towards the executive floor. “You’re bigger than emails,” Ben is told when he fails to receive any, itself a sinister building block as Parris brings a strong shape to the everyday setting slowly warping as the story unfolds.
Inevitably, the activities of the executive floor are a disappointment and owe much to the nature and liberty-focus of Ballard’s penthouse inhabitants in High Rise which offers a similar sense of a stratified physical building, but they prove far less interesting than the more structured experience of life downstairs. Having got Ben to where he needs to be, Parris doesn’t seem sure what to do with the rest of the story, leaving the character there for too long with no obvious outcome for the show. Having gained so much traction elsewhere, The Unstoppable Rise of Ben Manager loses it again here with a fuzzy conclusion.
Performing as Ben, Parris creates the office world and his character’s increasing perplexity well, happy to accept anything that comes as long as it lasts. yet always nervous about being found out. Paulina Krzeczkowska plays the fey CEO and operates Derp, voiced by Mike Coxhead, who together fill out the rest of the office nicely.
If Parris can rebalance the story to spend more time in the office and plot towards a more satisfying conclusion about the consequences of promotion, then The Unstoppable Rise of Ben Manager has the potential to be a very fine and very smart sci-fi office parody.
Reviewed on 26 April 2024
