THE BOSS OF IT ALL (New Perspectives TV/Soho Theatre)***

 

By Aashiq

Link: https://sohotheatre.com/shows/the-boss-of-it-all/ £12, age recommendation 14+

Available until: Shows on Sunday at 4pm and 8pm

I’ve never worked in an office. I doubt I’d last five minutes. I don’t really know what goes on in offices, but it sounds really stressful and confusing with all those forms and files and having to be horrible to everyone who phones up with perfectly reasonable questions and thinking up creative reasons why everything is the caller’s fault and not theirs. Though actually, I really like being creative and I’ve definitely said things in my career that aren’t true. Like when I claimed I’d been in a plane crash; when I pretended to be blind; when I sold my brother as a slave and told my dad he’d been killed by a homicidal goat… honestly, the things these playwrights make us say!

I’ve also heard that some offices don’t let men wear make-up and heels and I don’t think I could cope with that. What am I supposed to do if I have a bad face day? I don’t just wear make-up for me, you know. And it can be a great conversation-starter. ‘Are those your real eyelashes or is it just mascara?’ has so much more potential than ‘Did you see EastEnders last night?’ (Yes, they’re real, and no, I didn’t.)

It was difficult to be sure what to make of The Boss of it All at first. It was clear that what was going on was immoral and probably illegal and I wasn’t completely sure how funny it was supposed to be. Comedy and tragedy aren’t that far apart. It’s hilarious in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Lysander and Demetrius drop Hermia (sometimes literally) and start running round after Helena, who thinks they’re making fun of her. But it would also be possible to show exactly the same situation as a tragedy. It’s totally humiliating when your boyfriend and your admirer suddenly decide they like your best mate instead (not that it’s ever happened to me, but it’s the kind of thing I get paranoid about all the time) So The Boss of it All could have been a terrible crime of impersonation and deception or it could have been a total farce.

It took a little while, but once I’d decided it was a farce, there was no reason to change my mind. The Boss of it All is not a top-class farce, but it’s a fun way to pass an hour and thirty-five minutes with some amusing situations, interesting characters and a storyline that suits Zoom perfectly. The original story was a film by Lars von Trier from 2006 and was set in an actual office (in those days, it was still legal to be in the same room as another person). Writer and director Jack McNamara has rewritten it so it takes place entirely on Zoom and it mostly works really well. The fact the characters can’t be physically together gives everyone a bit less control of the situation and isn’t that what a farce is all about? (I’m not sure how the contract situation worked at the end, but all I know about contracts is that they’re about as interesting as a female-only nudist colony and you never sign them till someone clever has read them first.)

The Boss of it All is about a guy called Ravn who has his own company, but he hasn’t actually told anyone he’s the boss. Instead, he’s invented a fictional boss. Which is all fine till they want to do a deal with someone who wants to speak to the actual boss. Rather than come clean and look like an idiot, Ravn hires an actress and looks like an idiot. The actress, Kristina, plays the role of the boss of a company she knows very little about, speaking to various ‘co-workers’ she doesn’t know, and desperately winging it when they refer to their email correspondence, which Ravn has neglected to mention.

The actors do a really good job, not only presenting their characters clearly but coping with the technical demands of Zoom (and to anyone who tells me Zoom isn’t rocket science, what goes zoom if not rockets? And anyone who even thinks about mentioning cameras can just go away. That’s just one of those annoyingly clever points that ruins the whole joke). The characterisation is really well done by McNamara and the actors – they all work as characters in a farce, but they have depth. The script is pacey and I was genuinely shocked to discover it was the end already.

Josie Lawrence is on top form Kristina, the deeply eccentric but unexpectedly compassionate fake boss. Ross Armstrong plays the inventively idiotic Ravn, the kind of person who would drive you mad in person but put him onscreen and he’s brilliant. Angela Bain, Rachel Summers, Yuriko Kotani and Jamie de Courcey transform Gorm, Lise, Mette and Spencer from what initially seem like stereotypes into real people with personalities, lives and histories.

At £12, The Boss of it All is quite expensive for an online play, but this isn’t so much a stage play you can watch online as a play being shown in exactly the right medium so I’d say it’s worth paying a bit of money. If you’ve got it, spend it.