A performance revue like you’ll never get in an officer tower, this Kiwi satire is for anyone who’s ever had a job, or thought about getting one.
TICKET LINK: https://tickets.gildedballoon.co.uk/event/14:7088/
H.R. The Musical turns corporate life into musical theatre. What workplace behaviour did you discover was already so ridiculous that it barely needed parody?
The corporate values awards is a classic example of a workplace scenario that makes everyone want to barf. There’s something so primary school about awards and certificates and ceremonies, and the fact that most corporate values are practically indistinguishable from the corporate values at the company next door, and the one next door to them, seems constantly to be lost on the poor bastards who have to pretend they actually believe in these things. Sometimes the so-called Values (often capitalised to suggest importance) are real words, and sometimes they’re buzzwords, but they’re most painful when they are made-up words like ‘Boundarylessness’. That was one of the values at a company I worked at, and I made up a very silly song all about it, which you can hear in the show.
The show covers everything from AI anxiety to DEI policies and endless restructuring. Was there a moment during development when reality overtook the satire and you had to rewrite a joke because the workplace had become even stranger?
The show has always been pretty close to the bone because these things are so everyday for so many people. I don’t think we’d ever be so foolish as to let reality overtake us (that’s the joy of being an artist, I reckon), but we’ve definitely seen audiences take a moment to realise we’re actually playing with all this serious stuff. We’re turning things upside down to underscore the madness of it all. The AI and DEI and restructure scenes hit some people pretty hard – let’s face it, chances are their job was “disestablished” just that day! – but the rhyme redeems all in the end. As the AI character says to its human counterpart at one point in battle (while gyrating, of course): “Post-work? You said it! Yeah, your work is done. Not like me after I hacked your mum.” AI can be so naughty.
You use musical styles ranging from rap and jazz to Latin plainchant. Which corporate activity most naturally lends itself to being sung about—and which one absolutely shouldn’t?
Well, I think passive-aggressive communication in email form is pretty ripe material – that’s the one we cover in Latin plainchant, and of course everyone working in organisations large or small is receiving, and/or writing these kinds of emails every day. I kind of like that we use what’s basically a dead language to translate phrases that have deadened our language through overuse, in a form that generally frustrates communication rather than achieves it. (There is in fact a tense called ‘the frustrative’ in at least one of the Amazonian languages. We need this tense in English!).
As to which corporate activity shouldn’t be sung about, I don’t think there are any limits. I love taking banal things and giving them a musical treatment, and in some ways the more extreme the better. Maybe this is me enacting the corporate value of Boundarylessness.
Every office seems to have its own bizarre language. What’s the worst piece of corporate jargon you’ve encountered, and did it make it into the show unchanged because nobody would believe you’d invented it?
So many of the terms used in corporate jargon – if they are comprehensible at all – draw on language which is either lewd or violent. I’m talking about “penetrating” markets and “global all hands” (gross!). I think these terms are just asking for it, if I may turn it round. What I object to more than these sub-languages existing in the context of commercial organisations (who have only a weak grasp on ethics, at best, by design) is when they get used outside those contexts in places they just do not belong. Like at the parent information evening for my son’s school, where they talked about “adding value” to the kids. Please! And when universities start talking about students as “customers” and government organisations call citizens “clients”. They should hand out a branded vomit bucket every time they use these terms.
Beneath the comedy, do you think modern workplaces have become genuinely more absurd, or are we simply more aware of the absurdity now that we’re expected to describe ourselves as ‘passionate stakeholders in a collaborative journey’?
I definitely think they’ve become more absurd. Humans just weren’t made to be working in the ways that we’re made to, in giant organisations in which our agency and humanity are constantly being thwarted in the name of the entity, and we are doomed to perpetual adolescence, never truly responsible for anything much. It’s thrown up (see the theme!) so many bizarre moments, and we are expected to suppress our objection to the source of these. There’s so much pretence involved, and it requires fundamental dishonesty from everyone, every single day to uphold the fictions which prop up these joints. Comedy gives us all a break from that, thank dog, so in many ways it’s revolutionary. I do hope you’ll all come revolt with us this Fringe!
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