Wage Against The Machine
Te Auaha Cinema, 65 Dixon St, Te Aro, Wellington
02/03/2023 - 11/03/2023
Production Details
Matt Harvey
Following the COVID-19 outbreak, comedian and journalist Matt Harvey (The Shovel, The Shot) found himself about to be stood down, and the only support his decade long job offered was an email on how to sign up to Jobseeker.
Now Matt has nothing to hold back as he talks about the jobs he no longer needs to worry about being fired from and what he did to earn money simply for the luxury of eating food AND paying rent at the same time.
Punch your time card and clock-in for a fast-paced hour of comedic storytelling, set in the surprisingly angry world of customer service where the daily grind is minimum wage, maximum grief… and the customer is always wrong.
From illegal government debt, wage theft and saving the lives of eighteen people, it is all in a day’s work when you earn minimum wage.
Te Auaha – Cinema, Level 1, 65 Dixon Street, Wellington
Thur 2 – Sat 4 March 2923
Thur 9 – Sat 11 March 2023
8.30pm
Koha donation
BOOK
Stand-up comedy , Theatre , Solo ,
1 hr
Casual recounting of a rollercoaster life as they do it in Australia
Review by Margaret Austin 03rd Mar 2023
“C’mon in guys, you haven’t missed much,” is how Matt Harvey greets a couple of latecomers to his show. This note of cheerfulness and good humour turns out to be a theme of Wage against the Machine, performed in Te Auaha’s cinema.
I’m not sure that “performed” is the most accurate word. This is casual story telling which has the advantage of appearing spontaneous, allowing for easy interaction with the audience.
Harvey has spent years in customer service. Recently though, he enjoyed an enforced break because of the pandemic. But he was offered welfare support by his boss. How’s that? That’s the way they do things in Australia.
His tales of being a roller coaster operator in a theme park in Melbourne are a highlight. There were plenty of ups and downs. A shady job at Club X followed, where he became, as he puts it, a purveyor of porn. “We might get raided by the police”, he is casually warned by his employer – you have to rent porn not actually sell it. Harvey retaliates by occasionally raiding the till – part of his wage against the machine. A reaction fully justified considering he was later the victim of something called Robodebt, whereby money paid to beneficiaries can get clawed back in the form of illegal debt. That’s the way they do things in Australia.
But then, he grins, the government funded him to develop this show. And he completes his story with a return to his days as a roller coaster operator. I suggest that such a job has offered him a theme for life.
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