The publicity is so promising: a play about the “economic climate [that] breeds the hunger for change” and “takes a straight jab to the throat at what is now our tax system and confronts the challenges of business owners, blue-collar labourers, office workers and the big business money men in a comedy of tragedies that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”  

By half way through I am indeed on the edge of my seat, waiting for this travesty to finish so I can leave.

I’ve trusted it initially. Written by C C Shackle (his given names are Cloud Coal according to the programme) and David Allen, who also directs and plays multiple roles, the script is at its strongest when the women employees articulate what’s wrong with the sexual harassment they are constantly subjected to, although the harassment and their reactions do become repetitive.

We are asked to witness to a day in the life – or the last day in the demise – of Paul Massey Contractors, where every time the radio is turned on for no apparent reason, we get a news item about student loans, the economy, employment issues … It’s a clumsy contrivance I could forgive, all other things being credible. But they’re not.

Paul ‘The Boss Man’ Massey (Phillip Wilson) is supposedly a good bloke who looks after his staff and workers as if they were family, although he arrives at work half drunk, he routinely hits on Sheryl ‘Shaz’ Honeyfield (Emma Jones), the full clichéd office girl who paints her lips and nails, and he takes for granted Barbara ‘Barb’ Wilcox (Harriet Josey-Kerr), the only person who ever seems to work.

When John, a property developer from the USA (played by Allen, who is American), issues an ultimatum about a job getting done or he’ll pull the plug on the contract, does Massey pull finger? No, he fart-arses about doing absolutely nothing to resolve the problem. Whatever dramatic energy could be sourced from this premise simply evaporates to nothing.

Colin (Allen, and therefore also American but with a different broad accent), the slack-arsed worker who also hits on Shaz and is supposed to be on the job that’s in jeopardy, is subjected to a ridiculous scenario whereby he has to get from Wellington to the building site in Upper Hutt but his car is unwarranted so Paul tells him to get the bus. But he misses it so drives and gets arrested by a cop whose kids used to go to school with Paul’s son “before the accident”, not that Paul can wangle a special favour accordingly. As for “the accident”, it is a cheap dramaturgical trick for winning sympathy that is very poorly judged.

When the cop, Graham (Allen), turns up he is not only American (because while Kiwi actors can usually adopt any number of accents, Americans can never do Kiwi) but he is also dressed as an old style New York cop. Go figure.

Allen completes his quartet of characters with an Irish debt collector from the IRD who wears knuckle dusters spelling TAX and IRD. His programme biography states, “He loves to make a fool of himself to make people laugh. He believes laughter is the key to happiness. Just be silly, why not?”

Well he may have been having fun but we in the audience were not laughing. Being silly in order to be laughed at might entertain your mates at a party when everyone’s drunk but that has nothing to do with what makes theatrical comedy work. The essential essence of ‘truth’ is absent; credibility, as the first casualty, is fatal to the project.

Given he is the co-writer and director of All a Man Wants is His Wage, I am tempted to assume David Allen is largely responsible for misguiding the play and production way off the rails C C Shackle had originally laid down for it. But then Shackle’s biographical note about using “a little light-hearted cheek and humour to cheer up the world and inspire Mt Taranaki to find his true love [Mt Tongariro] once again” offers little to support that theory.

Although Harriet Josey-Kerr and Emma Jones both do a good job of grounding their characters in credibility, thus giving us something to care about, it’s not enough to save the proverbial day. Nothing about the way the business is set up and run, let alone the world outside in which it operates (apart from the realistic radio broadcasts), is credible.

I have to dash off to another show so am unable to stay for the offered company / audience chat but I gather 1000 Heroes has been instrumental in turning what was the Rock Shop (in the arcade off what used to be Manners Mall) into a Fringe performance venue. For that, at least, much thanks.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer