Temp for an hour in this immersive, interactive, one-participant theatre experience
Didn’t think you would spend an hour at Edinburgh Fringe as a temp?
Temping, crafted and devised by Dutch Kills Theatre Company, is an immersive piece that puts you in the shoes of a temporary temp, filling the shoes of a former employee at a firm. Written by Michael Yates Crowley and directed by Michael Rau, slipping into this life for an hour will turn out to be one of the strangest things you can do at fringe.
You, a singular audience member per performance, is firstly given a waiver to sign and a handbook to read before you are taken into a hyper realistic office cubicle and left to begin your new job by yourself. The room is rendered in fine detail, with postcards on the wall, chocolates in the drawer and a photo of former employee Sarah Jane’s nephew beside the computer.
Slowly you begin together the lives of all of the people that work at the firm, through voice recordings left by Sarah Jane instructing you how to perform your job, emails from Diego and answer phone messages from James. The printer has a life of its own and deposits new messages and titbits of information.
You are instructed to alter a spreadsheet full of the details of the company’s clients when they die, altering the status to Deceased. Each time, you are presented with a snapshot of the lives that these people rendered as numbers lived.
Temping tries to cut through the facade that office life can erect, showing that people are more than just numbers on a screen and that maybe there is more to life than this mere cubicle. The piece is transcendent and will live in your brain far longer than the poultry hour that you spend in its mundane but poignant world.