Emily Tomlins & Maggie Brown in Kindness. Photo by Sarah Walker.
The drudgeries of office life are something many of us are all too familiar with. It’s not just sterile and standardised spaces or monotonous work that is most depressing but the effects that the worst offices can have on people who just don’t want to be there. We’ve all seen it happen to a colleague or a friend. They start energised and optimistic but the divergence between what they want from their lives and what they get causes them to have the spirit drained from them in much the same way a spider sucks the liquefied innards out of a fly trapped in its web. Kindness captures the frustration and human carnage with sly humour but after a promising start the story lacked the punch to follow through.
All the classic office characters are there. The stiff, hyper stressed boss, played expertly by Emily Tomlins, the flighty temp, complete with online jewellery business, and the NQR long-term staffer who is constantly threatening to leave but is far too frightened to ever follow through. The anomaly in this painfully familiar milieu is Evelyn who just wants, well something. Initially a curiosity, then an annoyance and finally a kind of comfort, Evelyn’s authenticity and lack of self-consciousness provides a telling juxtaposition for the lives of these three neurotic office-workers.
It also teases out another uncomfortably familiar effect of the office life: a narrowing of perspective and the commensurate reduction in empathy. And this is the crux of the play, how people being put through the mill stop caring about each other. Bridget Mckay makes the point well and cleverly ridicules the stilted absurdities that define her character’s day-to-day life.
Towards the play’s end though, the pithy observations and interplay between the opposing characters runs out of steam. It ends rather abruptly and while ambiguous endings can be immensely effective when they answer only part of the questions lingering in the mind of the audience, they can leave you a little unsatisfied when they don’t answer enough. Perhaps this is the point; that despite momentary shake ups and challenges to the very narrow reality of the office, it usually reasserts itself and leaves you with a similar feeling. If so then the ending may be a matter of taste but to me it felt a little incomplete.
Kindness has that unique ability to make you simultaneously laugh and squirm in your seat. In this case they’re not just a ‘funny because it’s true’ moments but funny because it’s true about you and from that point of view it has an easy relatability. Whether it leaves you wanting more or not will perhaps depend on which moments are most true about you.
Rating: 3.5 stars out of 5
Kindness
Written by Bridget Mackey
Directed by Kate Shearman & Alice Darling
Lighting by Sarah Walker
Set and Costume by Yvette Turnbull
Sound by Andrew Dalziell
Performed by Maggie Brown, Tom Heath, Emily Tomlins & Rachel Perks
Presented as part of the FLIGHT Festival of New Writing
Theatre Works St Kilda
31 August – 9 July
