Lambeth Fringe 2025: Look Busy – Vaulty Towers, London

Writer: Judie Boom

Director: Rebecca Tully

Look Busy, directed by Rebecca Tully, and written and performed by Judie Boom, takes us to the year 2050, where 80% of jobs have been lost to AI, and a universal basic income allows citizens to choose whether to participate in labour at all. Against this backdrop, Boom’s character sets out to discover what happens to human ambition, self-worth, and meaning when productivity ceases to define identity.

The concept is timely and rich with potential. The notion of a society freed from compulsory work offers fertile ground for satire, particularly in an age still obsessed with “busyness” as a badge of value. Despite that promising foundation, Look Busy struggles to maintain narrative focus or thematic heft.  The story unfolds through a series of loosely connected reflections, each offering glimpses of the imagined future but few sustained insights. The time-travel framework lacks structure, and the pacing often falters as digressions overtake direction. What begins as a sharp conceit gradually meanders, leaving the audience uncertain of the destination.

Boom’s performance radiates approachability and warmth. She engages easily with the crowd and exudes a likability that keeps the piece buoyant even when the text thins. Yet, this same geniality underscores the production’s main weakness. The performance lacks authority and tonal control, with energy dissipating whenever momentum builds. Moments of audience engagement tend to distract rather than deepen the material, and the narrative’s speculative setting never feels fully inhabited.

The show’s treatment of artificial intelligence remains surface-level, framed almost exclusively around employment rather than the wider social, ethical, or emotional consequences of automation. The absence of that broader critique limits the work’s intellectual impact, reducing its future vision to a single, repeated anxiety: the replacement of workers by machines.

Look Busy emerges as an amiable but unfocused exploration of the future of labour. Its performer charms, its premise intrigues, yet both feel constrained by a lack of structure and depth. The result is a pleasant hour of speculative comedy that gestures towards profundity without quite reaching it.

Reviewed on 13 October 2025