BWW Reviews: SAXON COURT, Southwark Playhouse, November 24 2014

"Make me some farckin' money!" screams Donna, founder, boss and (yes) matriarch of Saxon Court, as she seeks to animate her gormless gang of recruitment to recruitment consultants. They're worried about their jobs (because there are no jobs) with 2011's Occupy Movement camped outside St Paul's and the economy drowning more than waving, as it seeks to get its head above the waves produced by the post Credit Crunch recession. Things are looking bleak... but (cue Noddy Holder) "IT"S CHRISTMAS", so there's a party to throw and office politics to resolve.

First-time playwright Daniel Andersen spent time working for a recruitment agency so he gets the ennui, the rivalry, the sheer slog of this quasi-people-trafficking business spot on. Put the right bum on to the right seat and it's three Bars on the fruit machine and pass the Bolly; fail to find the right seat, never mind the right bum for it, and your five bar gate on the whiteboard looks an awful long way short of that monthly target. Recruitment is a business that pretends to be about people, but it's actually about numbers.

Debra Baker's pouring of Thatcherism's ideology into the ghastly Donna is effective, but probably just a touch light on the charisma every such a leader needs - even her obvious favourite, the waspish Nat, is given too little reason to respect her and ultimately doesn't. There's too much shout and not enough smooch from this alpha-female. Alice Franklin has an even harder time as pneumatic wannabee WAG Tash, a character who spends too much time in knockabout with Nat and is only really given something to do when it's too late - we only catch a glimpse of the woman beneath the bitching and the boobjob.

The men fare better. John Pickard invests his wideboy Joey with an ageing man's vulnerability, so we see that his banter is a cover for something much deeper, that he'd prefer to keep away his work colleagues. Anxious university-educated pretty boy Noel is played beautifully by Scott Hazell, pushed and pushed and pushed, but too decent to do anything about it. Best of all is Adam Brown as Mervyn, the one who looks like an oddball, but is a perfectly normal man in a zoo of crazed animalistic humans.

Saxon Court (at Southwark Playhouse until 13 December) shows plenty of promise, but could do with a bit more of comedy's greatest friend - brevity. There's laughs - some big ones - but there's more shouts, and the plot drifts a little in the second half. That said, I'd love to know what these three men and three women are up to now, calmer, wiser and (one hopes) just a little more comfortable in their own skins.

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