CLIVE
Arcola Theatre
★★★
“the play, having built a world so rich with eccentricity, opts for a resolution that feels strangely cautious”
Thomas is working from home. He has been for years. But practitioners of this common condition will know immediately that something isn’t right about Thomas’s WFH set-up.
There is no pile of damp laundry, no mewling toddler pawing at his ankles wanting Bluey on the iPad, no mild burbling of Test Match Special in the background.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
In designer Mike Britton’s blistering set, Thomas’s home is antiseptic white. Clean-lined desk and chair. Laptop and phone. There’s a wall of white Ikea type cupboards upstage (which become a minor character in their own right thanks to Chris Davey’s clever lighting) and, finally and most impressively, the remarkable wipe-clean vinyl floor.
We meet fastidious Thomas with his mop shoes on, choo-chooing around the space, spritzing invisible germs with a bleach cleaner. Top half: shirt and tie for the Zoom; bottom half: boxers and bare feet.
Thomas tells us about life in his canal side apartment and, more particularly, we learn about his work in IT through video calls and emails, which he recounts to us with a bitchy relish. Actor Paul Keating does his best work of the hour as the office gossip, relaying who’s in and who’s out and the rise of the dreaded Naomi, the new COO.
He loved the office. He misses the sense of community. He was “the only person who reads the manuals” so he was on hand with the coffee maker and the faulty printer. He was a stalwart of cake-based gatherings and bantz.
Award-winning playwright Michael Wynne has a pitch-perfect ear for the soulless, jollying-along jargon of the modern hybrid office – “you’re on mute” – and later, when things turn dark, how this hollow dialect becomes the banal language of corporate oppression and bullying.
Because Naomi has Thomas in his sights. Oh yes, Thomas is next for the cull. There are meetings with the “Head of People”, bogus allegations of incompetence and his sociability is weaponised as inappropriate.
Thomas is defined by his job, so without it his sequestered life collapses into drift and disorientation. He loses perspective…
And here, sadly, is where director Lucy Bailey’s vivid and sharply designed production begins to falter.
Perhaps the surreal brilliance of Severance or Brazil hovers overhead and infects our expectations – because by now, with the eye-scorching whiteness of the set, the emptiness of corporate speech, and the quirks of isolated Thomas, we’re primed for something stranger.
But the play, having built a world so rich with eccentricity, opts for a resolution that feels strangely cautious. Thomas’s descent gestures toward a dramatic rupture but lands on something more recognisable – a soft undoing, wrapped in quotidian trauma.
Take, for example, Clive the four-foot cactus, headliner, and a prop of prickly promise. It remains just that – static and symbolic, never quite earning the weight the play seems to assign it. We keep waiting for the twist, the outlandish transformation. It never comes. It is briefly a metaphor – life is spiky, brush it the wrong way and it wounds – but then it retreats into anonymity.
None of this reflects on Keating’s personable, warm-hearted performance. He is a winning presence, never better than when re-arranging his baked beans “labels out”. The production is a short, witty takedown of WFH signifiers. It just runs out of invention 20 minutes too soon.
CLIVE
Arcola Theatre
Reviewed on 1st August 2025
by Giles Broadbent
Photography by Ikin Yum
Previously reviewed at this venue:
THE RECKONING | ★★★★ | June 2025
IN OTHER WORDS | ★★★★ | May 2025
HEISENBERG | ★★★ | April 2025
CRY-BABY, THE MUSICAL | ★★★★★ | March 2025
THE DOUBLE ACT | ★★★★★ | January 2025
TARANTULA | ★★★★ | January 2025
HOLD ON TO YOUR BUTTS | ★★★★ | December 2024
DISTANT MEMORIES OF THE NEAR FUTURE | ★★★ | November 2024
THE BAND BACK TOGETHER | ★★★★ | September 2024
MR PUNCH AT THE OPERA | ★★★ | August 2024
