A Biting Anti-Capitalist Horror Comedy
Inksplat Theatre Company previewed new horror comedy What’s Rotting in the Office Fridge? at 18 Candleriggs. The show is set in a dystopian future and centres on six employees working at Last Resort Incorporated, their productivity tracked by an omniscient upper management. Each of the characters deals with their setting differently, from neurotic devotion to the job to concentrated apathy to sucking up to their boss. The show is going to be edited before a run at the Edinburgh Fringe from the 24th to 29th of August.
The young company were both earnest and enthusiastic. There were some standout performances, Rebekah Copeland delivered a standout performance of the bitter Bridget. The show has some genuine laugh-out-loud moments, which is no small thing to achieve. Whilst there were some unsettling moments, the sequence with the call from HR was excellent; the show ends up falling harder on the comedy end of the horror-comedy spectrum.
The script aims to cover a wide range of topics, with mixed success. There’s enough material in the two-hour show to create four different plays. The show touches on surveillance, the bystander effect, misogyny, capitulating to a system that hates you, the pointlessness of menial labour, leaving your dreams behind and the perils of inter-office dating. Each of the six characters, save for Robin (who is ostensibly the protagonist but has little in the way of concentrated stage time) has an arc and relationships. However, in trying to cover so much in a single show, the show ends up feeling unsatisfying. Future versions of the show would benefit from focusing more tightly on fewer elements. Additionally, whilst there were often funny moments, the jokes would land harder if the scenes were much shorter.
It would have also been good if the setting had been more explicitly established. There were also some moments of logical inconsistency: employees weren’t allowed to leave, yet they clearly had relationships and lives outside of work. The oblique references to ‘what happened’ contributed to a sense of unease but ultimately felt repetitive and, at times, unsatisfying.
What’s Rotting in the Office Fridge? has good bones, and with some concentrated trimming, more consideration of the implications of its setting and slightly tighter sound and lighting effects, the show could shape up to something very special in time for Fringe.
