Canberra Youth Theatre's latest play looks at the adolescent workplace- the fast food venues where young people from 13 to 22 have their first work experience, and learn about tension, exploitation, customer demands and occasionally acquire a bit of spare money to start getting ahead in the game of capitalism. Honor Webster-Mannison's script emphasises the grueling repetitiveness, the familiar customer complaints asking for discontinued lines of food and things you've never sold, the constant attempts to keep ahead of the supply chain, moving through the paces of a shift. There's highs and lows, there's surreal trips into the strangest of sidelines and there's the occaisonal passionate longing speech as we get inside the service workers's heads to discover how they escape, but we know they'll be back at the prep station or the till shortly to continue the same old tasks.
Luke Rogers' production stylises this on a tilted stage with a ball pit at the bottom - the balls thrown back and forth represent the various foodstuffs being prepared and sold - a budget-conscious way of not having to waste a lot of actual food on stage and a fun way to present it (though the ballpit isn't exactly tightly controlled, leading to a lot of balls for the stagecrew to collect and return every night back to the pit). A lot of the scenes of repetative chaos do feature a lot of overlapping dialogue and it does lead to a slight case of stagnation in the staging, which the surreal interludes help to break. The more human sidescenes like the interractions between Drive and Food-Prep during their breaks, or the individual antics of the Regular customer, tend to stand out by their contrast - and Food Prep's final monologue does feel deeply incisive while also feeling like material that I'd much rather have seen folded into the play at the expense of some of the whole-cast-spectacle sequences which felt a bit draggy.
Ethan Hamill's video design is a particular highlight, lifting the show in interesting ways, and Kathleen Kershaw's set and costume designs give the production a great deal of the fun it has, whether it be the blandness of the uniforms, the brigh-redness of the decor or the pleats of the regular's formal dress.
This is a lively production with a lot to say in its one hour run-time, but in getting trapped in the desire to repeat mundane regular tasks it does lose time to cover in more depth the truly interesting parts of its subject. It's a short fast shot to the system, and much like its subject, there are probably better theatrical meals to be had, but this hits the spot for now.
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