We are all familiar with the work-play. The Swiss writer Urs Widmer has here come up with something different: the out-of-work play. Set in an agency offering therapeutic advice to sacked senior executives, this is the kind of sharply knowing satire on the world of business you encounter in the work of the French dramatist Michel Vinaver, but all too rarely in Britain.
What instantly strikes one is the kinship between business and theatre. Five sacked suits - four men, one woman - gather under the supervision of Mary Keegan's Churchillian top girl to learn how to adjust to redundancy. They do walking exercises, toss a fluffy ball from hand to hand, play corporate musical chairs and indulge in various forms of role play. At one point the emotionally disintegrating Patrick Driver - the actors all use their real names - has to pretend to be the boss giving himself the sack. In a trice the hapless victim becomes the sadistically abrupt persecutor.
The wit of Widmer's 90-minute play lies in its double focus. Losing your job, it suggests, is a painful, dignity-sapping process at any level. But it also goes on to imply that there is something tainted and corrupt about the corporate Eden from which these senior suits have been expelled. It's a world in which ludicrously euphemistic jargon, such as "downsizing" and "outsourcing", conceals a brutal reality, and in which humiliation of the employee, involving re-employment at a starkly reduced salary, is a standard managerial tactic.
I'm not sure how far Widmer pushes his argument: whether he is asking for a more humane capitalism or the destruction of the entire system. At the end, a utopian vision of compassionate communality is followed by an interweaving of the biblical apocalypse with the chanting of big, multi-national brand names.
Even if there is a faint fuzziness about the conclusion, there is none about the depiction of the unappeased ache of joblessness. Directed and co-translated by Patricia Benecke, the piece is dazzlingly performed by the suited sextet, with outstanding performances from Driver as a helplessly tearful senior exec and Julia Marsen as a status-conscious high-flier stoically accepting redeployment to the South Korean border. This is the redundancy play raised to the level of fine art.
· Until September 20. Box office: 020-7620 3494.
