A Shanghai factory worker (Rebecca Boey) makes circuit boards in inhumane conditions, a notice warning that: “If you don’t apply yourself today, you’ll be applying for a job tomorrow.” In a hotel room, a jet-setting executive (Richard Corgan) talks to his wife and child on one screen, while staring at a woman offering webcam sex on another. A manager (Solomon Israel) in a Senegal call centre complies with management demands, with catastrophic results. A Bucharest engineer (Kate Miles) ignores her children, but spies on them via a webcam while at work.
The effects and inequalities of globalisation are highlighted in Alexandra Badea’s fervent, over-simplistic four-hander, which suggests that, just as in the 19th and 20th centuries people’s health was blighted by heavy industry, so contemporary lives are destroyed by a world where everything is supposedly connected, but human life is devalued.
If the characters were more sharply defined, this might have more impact. But they are nameless types, not people you can identify with strongly, and the stories being spun are familiar ones, such as the way that the culture, and even the names, of those working in overseas call centres are obliterated.
Andy Sava’s production does little to create tonal variety in the four entwined monologues, which unfold with grim relentlessness. With the actors all sharing the same space for such significant amounts of time, it’s hard to see these lost souls, harder still to care about them.
• At the Arcola, London, until 27 May. Box office: 020-7503 1646.
