work.txt (Modern Plays)

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work.txt is going on tour internationally next year, Super High Resolution is being produced in German in Kassel in February. Alongside the screenwriting stuff, I’m also in the R&D phase of a new experimental play I am directing about surveillance capitalism and I am writing a new play about hiking. The play concludes with a sort of semi-serious ramble about various existentially surreal future predictions which don’t seem to be saying anything in particular, “In 50,000 years, light will dress for the job it wants”, furthering the impression that the script is by the by. The form, however, is fairly effective in as much as instead of paying a professional cast, the audience is made to work, not only not being compensated for their work, but actually paying for the honour, which many will find a familiar ploy in the gig economy. Following the course of a regular workday in a major city, in a major company, someone suddenly and without an apparent reason lies down in the office. The internet is outraged, the story goes viral, the art world is interested, and the parents of said person are on a cruise trying to enjoy their holiday. That is more or less the story of work.txt. However, the magic of this play really lies in the fact that you – the audience – are acting it all out. Both types of writing are amazingly difficult to get right, but in different ways. Screenplays respond much better to fast plots and to visual language. Very basically, scenes are much longer in plays, and characters have to return more often, so they all need to be intensely distilled. But it’s also true that the basics of good dramatic writing carry across into screenwriting.

Everyone should see work.txt. The play, if it can be called a play, is an immersive show experienced collectively through audience interaction. Because of this experimental quirk, your experience of the will obviously differ from mine. This does make it somewhat difficult to review having only seen it once, as it’s entirely possible that the experiment lives and dies depending on who is (or isn’t) in the room. He can’t live without almond milk and has said he’d be happy to receive it for his birthday any time.In A Fairie Tale, Niall Moorjani seamlessly blends the threads of racial identity, queerness and folklore to create a fantastical and poignant picture of modern Scotland. Read the full review here. Photo: Niall Moorjani It opens with the usual Dublin Fringe Festival notice: welcome to the show, please take note of emergency exits and switch off mobile phones. Meanwhile, words are projected on to the wall of the theatre telling the audience to ignore the instructions and to leave their phones on. This sets the tone for the show, with the projection acting as a sort of all-seeing eye. None of these details are for certain. Some are likely to recur from show to show, others will be totally unique to the moment. We learn and infer more about each other as we tell a story together. Our protagonist is Dan (who knows who yours will be). He stops working and an image of him lying on the ground captures the public imagination. We do our best to tell this story. A kids’ show with the thematic depth to appeal to child-free adults too, The Girl and the Dragon is a joyous adventure in storytelling performed by Niall Moorjani and Minnie Wilkinson. Read the full review here. Photo: Harry Elletson

He was born and lived in Hawaii, USA for a month, stopped by S. Korea to meet his family, then moved to China and lived there for around 7 years. He moved to S. Korea in winter when he was 8. (Weverse Q&A) Emily Davis is a producer of theatre and live events. She is producer at Farnham Maltings and associate producer with Poltergeist Theatre who were named in the Guardian's 'best young theatre companies'. Recent credits include Ghost Walk by Poltergeist Theatre starring Juliet Stevenson and Paterson Joseph, work.txt and work.txt online, and i will still be whole (when you rip me in half) by Ava Wong Davies (**** The Stage). There are some parts of work.txt that I have struggled to remember, but I think all of these parts can be suitably covered with the following summary: you spend an hour anxiously watching the side of your screen to be sure you don’t miss a task sent to you by the chat function. You are so busy making sure you do your work on time that it makes it difficult to do anything else. Alok Vaid-Menon blends vulnerability with humour in an unapologetic and defiant hour of performance. Read our full review here. Photo: Lottie Amor But this is the wrong question. Or at least, it’s a question that is easily answered: ‘because I do not know which work I should be doing.’ This leads to a better question: ‘what is the nature of the work that I am doing?’. Asking this helps us begin to answer the current beneath all these work-questions, ‘what is the work that I want to do?’.

Socialise

The audience read a projected text together out loud, with lines assigned by categories ("people with brown hair", "people who earn more than thirty thousand pounds a year"), follow instructions onstage and are fed lines by headphones as part of a collective, interactive experience. Nominated for an Innovation Award at VAULT Festival 2020, work.txt is written by Nathan Ellis who was previously a member of the Royal Court Invitation Writers' Supergroup 2018-19 and in 2020 was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award.

Nathan Ellis is a writer for stage and screen. In 2020 his play Super High Resolution was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award run by the Soho Theatre, coming in the top six out of 1500 submitted plays. His plays include No One Is Coming to Save You (a 'blazing debut' (the Guardian), published by Oberon) and work.txt (**** the Guardian). In 2021, he made Still Life, a digital play series commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse. He has TV projects in development with Greenacre Films and Balloon Entertainment. He is represented by Giles Smart at United Agents and is based between London and Berlin.

Author

Sami Ibrahim's latest show is a captivating story depicting the callousness of our immigration system. Ultimately, the performances in Violent Burst... compose a powerful odyssey of both humour and moving sentiment. Read the full review here. Photo: Conor Jatter Graeber’s most perceptive question is ‘what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?’ Capitalism has made us value the wrong kinds of work. Work for financial gain has become the most visible and most societally valued kind of work. But we work in exchange for so many things, and we get so many things in exchange for much other than work. I wonder, sometimes, what would happen, if we framed the value of work in the terms of Ann Boyer’s question ‘but who made this world?’. If we collectively decided that we were exchanging our work for how much world we made by doing it? So far I have only worked with brilliant directors, and that helps. I made a decision with SHR to just trust the director entirely, and it has, fortunately, paid off. I spent the first week making small tweaks to the text to fit the brilliant actors, and answering questions when they came up and I could be helpful, but my creative interventions in rehearsal are very limited. I’m amazed by what the other creatives have come up with, I don’t have better answers than them. He studied at Yongmun Middle School and Lila Art Highschool, but has been transferred to Hanlim Multi Art School since the second half of 2019. Temping is a jewel-like show, elegantly paced with a constant flow of ‘work’, and, of course, slowly dawning revelations about office life, unexpected relationships, petty squabbles. But behind the mundane trivia of work lurk real lives and hopes – too easily snuffed out by your own complicity, and even by murkier activities that are only hinted at. There’s a limit to how far Dutch Kills can go before shattering the illusion they’ve so carefully created, so in many ways Temping is full of ideas that could be far more fully developed in an alternative format. Nonetheless, it’s a quietly moving, slightly unsettling, miniature masterpiece of a show.