A hardcore tech and aesthetic art installation experience absent of something exciting and new.
Adapted from Olga Ravn’s 2021 Booker-shortlisted sci-fi novel, The Employees marks Polish theatre director Łukasz Twarkowski’s UK debut. Little doubt, featuring hallmarks of European theatre, such immense slow-motion, live camera avant-garde design, and extra loud music, The Employees is indeed a theatrical awe, but unwrapped as bland and banal at its core.
Set aboard a spaceship workplace staffed by both humans and their humanoid clones (brilliantly played a cast of seven, probably signalling at the seven deadly sins), the show is told through fragmented witness statements. It endeavours to explore workplace ethics alongside human–humanoid relationships. As the humanoids become increasingly odd and rebellious, the corporation decides to terminate the spaceship, discarding their bodies while uploading their memories elsewhere.
A massive cuboid stands onstage, with four tik-tok style vertical screens fitted its four outside-walls, and four live-screens on top of the entire cuboid. The audience can walk around and peer into the cuboid anytime during the performance, ostensibly choosing which live moments to observe (no doubt for the night I attend, it’s the sex scene between two female humanoids). There are also three “mini-intervals”, each for three minutes, where the audiences are encouraged to move, to change seats, and to dance. However, the cuboid is almost conspicuously concealed from our views as it is all covered by colourful strips, making it rather hard for the audience to follow the live action.
As a result, audience participation becomes purely superficial formality. To follow the “narrative”, you must rely on the topped live-screen, and I’m still not convinced of the point of attending a theatrical event if the entire experience is spent watching screens. In fact, for most of the time, I feel I’m watching European art movies. There is a meta-theatrical moment I find amusing, where the spotlights and the corporate AI voice becomes self-aware. It is a witty annotation to the show’s theme, but to better understand the nature of human-object relationships, a standard humanoid-awakening plot is far behind.
Twarkowski unreservedly shows his muscles in the last termination part with a true sense of intensity. Twarkowski layers live slow-motion, live video (Jakub Lech) on the top screens, and delayed live video on vertical screens to amplify the termination of the humanoids, creating an astounding, apocalyptic mise-en-scène with some references to religious paintings such as Dürer’s Adam and Eve and Michelangelo’s Pietà. It’s a pure triumph both in hardcore technology and aesthetics, though some of the slo-mo stretches drag on. In fact, the whole production runs too long, exacerbated by drawn-out scene changes where nothing seems to change.
During the Q&A, a historian asked about non-human agency: What does it mean to say “I love you” to a stone that can’t respond? How does that shape our network of relationships, and ultimately, humanity? Like her, I was drawn to the promise of examining human–nonhuman dynamics, only to find the disappointing narrative fall back on the familiar trope of humanoid awakening and rebellion.
In an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, the BBC producer advises Jim to wear a dark suit against a traditional wooden background with leather portraits if he’s announcing something exciting and new, but a modern suit against a colourful background with abstract paintings and high-tech furniture if his speech is absent of creativity and originality. The Employees ultimately feels like the latter, I’m afraid.