Interviews: Temping and Work.txt

Two plays making their Fringe debut will put the audience to work, helping us explore our love-hate relationship with our daily grinds. In Temping, a show for one audience member at a time, you’re subbing for middle-aged actuary Sarah Jane. Sat at her desk, you’ll uncover her story through emails and Excel spreadsheets and possibly, as director Michael Rau puts it, “exorcise some demons” in the process. “You can write that email you’ve always wanted to write to your boss,” he laughs. Playwright Michael Crowley expands: “You’ll do ‘work’ but you can be good or you can be bad at it! Both ways make for a great show.”

More than a workplace revenge fantasy, Temping encourages brave, big-hearted questions about how humans spend the majority of their waking hours. “What is this strange world that we call ‘going to work’?” asks Crowley. “At some point, it’s going to stop. Maybe because you quit, or get fired, or get sick, or you die… the work will stop. How do you get your head around the meaning of that work, and how much of yourself do you want to give to it?”

Intimate and mindful, Temping’s not the kind of ‘interactive’ show where an actor will come and “touch your face”, as Rau puts it. “Neither of us are fans of that!” Yet the visceral responses it receives continue to surprise its creators: “We’ve even had people quit their real jobs and write to us to tell us.” And since the pandemic, they’ve realised that Temping’s depiction of life in an average office cubicle has morphed into something of a period piece. “The world has changed, and so has the way that we work,” reflects Crowley. “There’s this noticeable new element of nostalgia.”

Temping, photo by Alley Scott

Over in Summerhall, Work.txt by Nathan Ellis takes a more communal approach: in this show, fellow audience members become colleagues as you perform the show together, through a series of gentle, optional, text-based instructions. The initial ‘job’ taken to task is that of a social media manager (“because I’ve done that job” Ellis laughs, darkly) but it’s designed to poke fun at “bullshit jobs” across the board.

Influenced by the book Bullshit Jobs, by anthropologist David Graeber (who died in 2020), Work.txt picks at the boundary between our self-worth and our work selves. “It’s a show about being always on, turning all of your hobbies into work: these questions of optimisation and labour just stretching out into everything that we do,” says Ellis.

The play took digital form in 2020, but Work.txt was always intended for a room full of people – and the labour crises of 2022 have made it particularly timely. “We had this a moment when a lot of people got paid not to work, and we haven’t metabolised that yet,” Ellis muses. “What does it mean to be useful, or essential? To have purpose? These were difficult, risky questions before the pandemic, but even more so now.”

The last years have devastated the theatre industry, and Fringe economics are stretched tighter than ever before. Have these shows cracked the code to prosperity by casting their audiences as performers? “Nope!” says Ellis, and Work.txt confronts this head on: “Is the value in theatre in your enjoyment? Or are you paying to see actors cry?”

Behind the scenes, Temping is staffed by two people – that’s a 2:1 ratio for every audience member. For Crowley, it stands against the capitalist urge to consider value in terms of prices and profit. “This is not that show. To experience it is to accept that there’s a different way of thinking about art."