BOARDROOM BEASTS
This may break all records for the smartest costumes ever at the Southwark’s smallest space: six irreproachable business suits, including two sets of tweed-chic female tailoring on Natalie Lauren . She is the only woman in this over-declamatory boardroom drama by Farine Clarke. It met approval on the pub theatre circuit and does, in a tiny way, after the end of Succession fill the liberal aesthete’s innate need to watch horrible very highly paid corporate directors ripping each others’ guts out.
. Though this time its without the family element: the giant UKNNG newspaper company is trying to acquire a surprisingly successful and even profitable smaller paper, in order (in the villains’ plan) to asset-strip it , sack much editorial staff, and ruin its integrity for a profit. Arabella admires it and wanted the merger; she says “Editors used to rule here too, fight like hell for editorial independence”. Christian shudders at the very idea. He also makes it clear that her concern for staff morale in a time of mass redundancy is `”an HR driven girly approach” and sneers at Charlie the finance director for being “a girl” before taking him to an all-male club to seduce his loyalty.
The play is a bit weakened by being set around the millennium, so the characters are looking ahead nervously to the age of “everything migrating to the web” including ad revenue. Now they would be crunching through podcast, paywall , TV and Times Radio statistics.
Also, when Arabella is admired for knowing about this new subliterate Japanese thing calles emojis – “like learning to read in reverse” it dates it a bit too hard. And that’s a shame, because Clarke is – though often far too discursively as the characters engage – offering some nice sharp takes on both complex racism and the misogyny that hires women as tokens and doesnt listen to them across the table.
Simon Furness’ nicely depicted Charlie the bean-counter is essentially decent, but constantly forced by the shouty American chairman to produce a better lot of figures by sharp practice and sackings. Salem the rising Asian on the board – a brooding Anirban Roy – is a creepy piece of work, briefly seen as proud of his rise to the British polo-playing establishment from an Indian childhood, but openly racist in contempt for the African-heritage black and principled owner of the targeted newspaper – Odimegwu Okoye. Christian (Harris Vaughan) , the nastiest of them all, is baffled by this difference since he reckons Salem is “halfway there himself”. We dont often get portraits of inter-BAME racism, so it’s interesting. So is Christian’s cod-psychological speech about successful women having broken childhoods (though I suppose that scene is there to push Arabella over the edge) .
The title by the way comes from Regents Park in London. Here as in any boardroom there is a wide outer circle and ain inner one: the question arises of where rhe mosque is , and where “the zoo with the monkeys”. A properly amusing metaphor. But the distinction between goodies and baddies is too sharply simplistic, and the surprise black-comedy resolution in the very short second act more startling than satisfying. I suspect it would be a better play if the author was not also director: it needs sharp trimming, some show-dont-tell in the characters’ various flaws. But it was topical on a day when two 2024 news groups were rumoured to be bidding for the Telegraph in the UAE takeover threat. The rating below doesn’t mean its not worth doing, and Clarke aims at some good targets. . But it misses a lot of chances.
southwarkplayhouse.co.uk. to 30 March
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