THE EMPLOYEES
Queen Elizabeth Hall
★★★★★
“a chance to see one of Europe’s edgiest directors bend time and space to his liking, and ours”
The Employees, an immersive, promenade style production by acclaimed Polish director Łukasz Twarkowski, is now in London, playing in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. This lengthy, dreamlike, multimedia creation, based on the science fiction novel of Danish writer Olga Ravn, will appeal to a variety of audiences. The best way to experience this show is to be drawn in without any expectation, and simply allow it to unfold. To be drawn into this world of flashing lights, pounding music, and moments of astonishing intimacy between the actors and audience via the medium of handheld cameras, projected onto a variety of screens.
Audiences for The Employees are free to move around on stage and the auditorium as they wish, for the entire duration. We are invited to take notes, take photos (except for moments of cast nudity), and examine the events of the show from a variety of perspectives. The actors themselves wander on and off stage. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they sit, and meditate. While we can’t actually enter the glowing box on stage which represents the living quarters of the crew on a spaceship, the videos give us a sense that we are also players in this show. We are part of the drama, as the actors stare intently into our eyes in moments of startling intimacy. They ask us to consider their dilemmas, their emotions. There’s a lot going on.
There is not so much a story, as a situation, being presented in The Employees. We are plunged into a situation where a group of humans are living with a group of humanoids that look exactly like them in every detail. The only way to tell whether a character is born, or manufactured, is by the identifying code on their clothes. A two digit number designates a human. Add a letter—a lowercase letter—and you have a humanoid. In this unnatural space, and on an unspecified mission in outer space, the humans are tasked with keeping track of any anomalies in their robotic doppelgängers. The mysterious Organization, their employer, is a disembodied voice instructing all the employees on their jobs. But the humans, it turns out, are the disruptors, the breaker of rules. They are lazy, duplicitous and pleasure seeking. While they appreciate a working environment that is apparently better than on the Earth they left behind, the humans still try to bend the rules. The humanoids in contrast, are constantly thrown into situations of existential doubt, when their primary objective is to become self aware. All kinds of messy emotions begin to emerge as the humans attempt to make the humanoids more “human.”
On one level, The Employees could be seen as a satirical take on late stage capitalism. It is a show that would delight the late David Graeber, author of Bullshit Jobs. Fans of the great Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem will also find many points of connection in the story, and the satire. Twarkowski’s work is asking big questions, all dressed up as a multimedia production where the audience and the actors, via live performance and video projection, perform in a playing space lacking the usual boundaries of a stage. Time is suspended, apart from three short breaks of three minutes each—a large digital counter on screen literally marking the seconds as we get up, stretch, move to a different location. The director, actors and technicians keep our sensory perceptions so busy that we don’t really notice the lengthy playing time. As we try to figure out the developing relationships between human and humanoid, the ultimate irony is that we don’t realize we have been co-opted into the Organization’s work project as well.
Perhaps the greatest achievement is that in the process of considering the dilemma of manufactured creatures without emotions, we develop a heightened appreciation of our own. Both good, and bad. Perhaps the saddest moment is when the robots realize that they can never experience birth. Watching children play becomes a torment to them. Contrast that sadness with a hilarious moment when the spotlights and the overhead lights of the Queen Elizabeth Hall suddenly reveal themselves to be sentient and launch into a good moan about how overworked and under-appreciated they are. All these perceptions feed into the overarching theme—that of the soulless nature of meaningless work. Or, to put it another way, work in search of meaning that is always flawed, and always incomplete. The Employees is a darkly dystopian warning on the predicament of twenty first century workers ensnared in the illusory promises of robotic capitalism.
And if this is too philosophical, too angst inducing a theme for evening entertainment, see the show anyway. It’s a chance to see one of Europe’s edgiest directors bend time and space to his liking, and ours. If there’s one criticism to be made of this production, it’s that the Queen Elizabeth Hall is probably not the ideal venue for a show that really needs to take place in an intimate dance space like a disco. Because the only way to escape an oppressive workspace is to groove on pounding sound, and to dance, right?
THE EMPLOYEES
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Reviewed on 16th January 2025
by Dominica Plummer
Photography by Natalia Kabanow
Previously reviewed at Southbank venues:
THE EMPLOYEES
THE EMPLOYEES
THE EMPLOYEES
