- Venue
- Barbican Arts Centre
- Location
- London
Cheesy music? Check. Party nibbles? Check. Social awkwardness? Bucket loads. Christopher Green and Ursula Martinez’s Office Party Xmas 2007 at the Barbican Pit Theatre had all the necessary ingredients for an excruciating night of organised ‘fun’. The artists transformed the theatre into a hellish grey function room complete with bar, dance-floor and plenty of tinsel; and a collection of business stereotypes – a talentless and boorish American CEO, a bossy head of Marketing, a raunchy female secretary – led the roaming crowd through a night of inappropriate drinking, casual sexism, and barely disguised animosity.
The audience members were integrated seamlessly into all of this. Before we entered the party, we were each given a name badge linking us to a department. Now I was Mary from Domestic Support, and everyone knew it. The badges meant we could participate in group activities, but more importantly they meant we were forced into social groupings with people we didn’t know and didn’t trust entirely. It felt just like work.
This social aspect of Office Party Xmas 2007 worked flawlessly. Somewhere between the peanuts on the bar and the Christmas tree by the dance floor, real social dynamics began to take shape. Some of my fellow members of Domestic Support were riled because they didn’t get an Executive badge; personally, I felt some bitterness towards the ‘Creatives’. People I had assumed were actors – a man who wore a bra and manhandled other men on stage, a competition winner who eagerly snogged the heads of department as his prize – were actually audience members whose tasteless behaviour was entirely spontaneous. And the badges meant that we could all address each other by name – not with permission, but with that sinister over-friendliness that only exists between colleagues or strangers.
It was, then, a perfect replica of the self-conscious awkwardness, unpleasant décor and unimaginative music of an office bash somewhere in a business park underneath a motorway flyover. But Office Party was also a platform for some independent acts. Tina C (Christopher Green) gave a rousing performance, belting out a couple of songs in-between pearls of her Southern-belle wisdom, and there was a surreal and hypnotic interlude when Robyn Simpson broke down a wall to melt into a dream-like dance sequence.
These independent acts worked best when they segwayed smoothly from the premise of the evening – that the orchestrated cheer of an Office Party belies the frustration people feel in their jobs. The dance sequence erupted perfectly, for example, from a realistic spat between Robyn from Accounts and the compere of a Christmas-pudding-eating contest. But, with the exception of Tina C, they were less successful as stand-alone performances. When the dancers ‘Two-Ché’ performed their po-faced routine to ‘Lady in Red’, undressing each other to reveal red pubic hair, it was so absurdly inappropriate it reminded us that we were not at a party, but a pastiche of one.
And this is the problem at the core of Office Party Xmas 2007. It worked well as an explication of the ways people package identity – both the meaningless epithets we load on other people (‘Mary from Domestic Support’ isn’t a great conversation-opener), and the lengths we might go to to escape our own labels, once encouraged to let our hair down. But the attention it paid to the mundane was also a little smug, and misguided. Catering to the lowest common denominator – as is the burden of office do’s everywhere – Office Party also flattered the knowingess of its audience. Fake disclaimers gave warnings about the subjectivity of ‘fun’, and the cartoonish ridiculousness of the CEO gave us all an intellectual escape route – enough room to sneer. But who were we laughing at? The downfall of the office do is not its lack of taste, but the fact that no-one wants to be there in the first place. These touches felt heavy handed and threatened to break the evening’s suspension of disbelief.
Office Party was most affecting when it avoided the conspicuous nod to irony. A sing-along at the end was both a searing critique of business-psycho-babble and a convincing exercise in togetherness. Here, encouraged to take our roles seriously, the audience saw the desparation of a work community in a different light. But perhaps the show’s reminders of pastiche served another purpose. Midway through the evening a friend confided, ‘I can tell this is a realistic office party – I’m thinking of leaving early.’ But by the end he was setting the dance floor alight and wishing the DJ would play ‘Agadoo’. Could it be that – shockingly – Office Party Xmas 2007 reveals that deep down, we all secretly like that kind of thing? Swap the drunken conversation with your boss, in fact, for the excuse of irony, and we might even pay £15 to do it.
