Review - Beyond Caring - The Yard Theatre, Hackney Wick

It is indicative of the atmosphere of this play that it should begin, simply, with Sean O’Callaghan walking from one side of the stage to the other.  The audience stop talking, wait for something to happen, and question whether that really was the beginning.  A light shines from the side of stage, and the play begins.

The ‘house’ lights – the building’s fluorescent strip lighting – are kept on.  We are voyeurs on a story of cleaners in a meat factory working on zero-hour contracts.  We follow three women as they proceed through a group interview, preliminary training and the following days of work.  They meet Phil, a full-time member of staff, and Ian, their power-hungry supervisor who is driven by ideals similar to Nietzsche’s Das Übermensch.  They sweep, they mop, they scrub the walls. They take a break, they eat some biscuits.  Phil reads a book.  Susan plays some music on an old cassette player.  They barely speak to each other, and when small moments of warmth and humanity occur they are shut down before we can feel like we really know these characters.  

It is saddening, because if that’s how we feel, we can fully understand how the characters must feel about each other.  We hear snippets of their back stories – Phil is divorced, Becky has a child – but never anything in detail.  Phil shuts himself in the toilet for fifteen minutes without any explanation.  Susan steals biscuits from Grace, presumably because she can’t afford to buy food.  Becky storms out of the room declaring that she is going for a cigarette five minutes before the official break time.  They are each having their own personal crises, but never talk about them, neither to each other or to us.  It all comes to a head when Becky storms back into the room, faces Phil, and they have sex between the delivery crates.  If that’s not a desperate plea for human compassion, I don’t know what is.

In a sense, the play calls our bluff as the middle classes sat with our glasses of wine and paper fans.  It is, essentially, a portrait of the working-classes as we recognise it.  We have preconceived ideas about who these people are – living off benefits, council-housed, tracksuit-wearing, uneducated, single parent – and the play is resistant to deny that.  The small moments of humanity bleed through when the group talk about Phil’s book or sing along to the music, but they are immediately snatched away and the group are straight back to work.  We are always moments away from finding something we can sympathise with, something we can care about.  But consider the title of the piece – ‘Beyond Caring’.  It is ironic that these people are portrayed to be beyond our care, and yet this play provokes the exact opposite effect.

What the play achieves is a gut wrenching confirmation of things we thought we knew about this coarse way of life, as well as things we denied about ourselves.  But cleverly, Alexander Zeldin has told it all emotionally rather than literally so that by the end, it is crippling to watch five people scrub meat fat off factory machines.  But when the most heartbreaking moment of all is when the coffee machine swallows Susan’s money, you know the play is doing something extraordinary.

 

In the Dialogue Theatre Club discussion after the play, we talked about the poignant symmetry of the men working in the warehouse next door to The Yard, chopping vegetables.  When we left the theatre, we peered into the factory, watched the men chopping, and carried on walking to the tube.  

This play felt a lot like that.