Writer: Rosie Blackadder
Director: Emma Halstead
One has to feel sorry for Gemma Caseley-Kirk’s Natasha throughout Higher Ups, a workplace comedy of sorts set within an actors’ agency. The CEO is an eccentric tyrant whose demanding behaviour has caused one assistant to quit, and the remaining staff have become so used to the high stresses involved in conforming to his whims that they, too, have become monsters.
Natasha is, in contrast, the perfect employee: trusting, kind, empathetic, and completely out of place. The dynamic is familiar, in fiction at least: The Devil Wears Prada, both in the movie and even in the vastly inferior musical, pitches the story of an ingenue in a cutthroat working environment far better.
What that fashionista melodrama doesn’t have, though, is a CEO (Dominic Taylor’s Brian) who has seemingly been abducted by aliens, dropped in Banna Brycheiniog near Brecon, and who is now claiming to be receiving instructions from higher beings who live in a can of baked beans.
Brian’s minions, Alice Marshall’s assistant Daisy and Jacob Lovick’s ambitious agent Samuel, start already highly strung and escalate from there as they struggle to meet the CEO’s increasingly erratic demands. There is the potential for sharp satire here regarding how far people should be expected to abase themselves to keep a job. However, while Rosie Blackadder’s script attempts to express that potential, it is stymied by the performances. Lovick, in particular, is so aggressively shouty that there is no chance to empathise with his position, and Marshall is not far behind. Throughout, there is the false impression that taking lines that aren’t particularly funny and shouting them will somehow introduce a level of comedy that isn’t there.
The fatal flaw in the whole satirical premise, though, is the character of Brian. Initially absent from surroundings, everyone else’s behaviour in the company suggests a despotic but highly charismatic individual who can provide enough fulfilment to offset the almost abusive working environment. But when Taylor arrives, we see instead a bumbling, hesitant figure who trips over every syllable without any level of confidence.
As Brian’s demands and behaviour become increasingly erratic, any satirical power remaining ebbs away. Once again, if the character could elicit some of the charisma he would need to become a CEO, the possible descent into a severe mental health crisis might elicit sympathy. Instead, we get more shouting and less characterisation, a problem throughout the play.
Ella Barraclough’s set design gamely attempts to cram an entire high-end office complex into the Old Red Lion’s small space, using the theatre’s multiple doorways as the basis for creating multiple spaces. The frenetic shuffling through doorways often distracts from the play’s potential just as much as the characters’ histrionics do.
The play’s second act somewhat ups the stakes but also retreads some familiar beats in the first. It accentuates that Blackadder’s script might be more effective as satire if trimmed to a tighter one-act structure.
By the end, the wholesome goodness of Caseley-Kirk’s character remains, partly because it has not been threatened in any substantive manner. And that is Higher Ups’s fundamental flaw. In creating a business environment that is so distorted and unbelievable, which never feels real, and which never justifies how it corrupts the soul of people within it, any possibility of satirising appalling workplace behaviour disappears completely.
Runs until 4 January 2025.
The Reviews Hub Score:
Insubstantial satire
