Writer: Michael Wynne
Director: Lucy Bailey
Michael Wynne’s new play about corporate bullying and the mental health implications of long-term social isolation is very good on the detail, the obsessive behaviours that become a kind of comfort blanket, but Clive is on less solid ground when it searches for overall purpose later in the show. Premiering at the Arcola Theatre, directed by Lucy Bailey, the structure of this monologue is designed to reinforce the growing separation of IT worker Thomas from the real world.
Employed by a firm that has entirely transitioned to home working, Thomas spends his days solving problems for his remote colleagues and caring for his large-scale cactus called Clive. Already obsessed with cleaning, Thomas’s anxiety grows when former office manager Naomi is promoted to Chief Operating Officer and his colleagues begin to disappear, one of whom sends him a chilling warning.
In the first half of Clive, Wynne creates an intriguing scenario, both in terms of the shadowy organisation that Thomas works for and in the creation of character traits that add to the unnerving feeling of distance around the central employee. Thomas – speaking directly to the audience – recalls affectionate office routines where, seated by the coffee machine, he felt at the centre of a network of colleagues sharing their work and some of their leisure time together. And the sense of decay that builds from that as the company transitions to working from home is tangibly realised in Thomas’s minor concerns about unanswered emails and in the closure of pubs and social spaces around the office, with no workers left to sustain them.
Yet, having built up the faceless organisation and the menacing Naomi, Wynne is less sure what to do with it all, following a predictable path that affects Thomas’ stability without exploring why any of it happens. This seems like a missed opportunity to properly test narrative reliability; is Thomas really the man he presents to the audience, or could any of the allegations be true? Wynne makes his character a perpetual victim, reaching back to a lightly sketched traumatic childhood of father issues and bullying, but the really interesting story here is in the present day, examining what this organisation is, why Naomi has accumulated so much power and why she targets specific people.
Paul Keating has a lot of ground to cover in a 70-minute monologue that requires him to report others’ speech instead of impersonating it and slowly increases Thomas’s anxiety as the show unfolds. It builds well, and although the story loses its direction once Naomi makes her move, Keating’s more scattering performance and the character’s unhealthy reliance on Clive the cactus are well managed.
The momentum in Bailey’s show ebbs and flows, some segments more engaging than others, and what is an already short play would justify a 10-minute cut. Wynne’s interest in the interaction between social isolation, work and institutional malpractice is interesting, but once the organisational element is taken away, the show, like Thomas’ life, unravels.
Runs until 23 August 2025
