In this sci-fi dystopia, Earth has been destroyed and a spaceship is orbiting an unknown planet. The setup, too, is unfamiliar, challenging many of the usual rules of theatre: the audience can at times walk on to the stage, film the performance and take pictures.
Based on the Booker International-shortlisted novel of the same name by the Danish author Olga Ravn, and staged in Polish (with English surtitles) by Warsaw-based company Studio teatrgaleria, The Employees tells the story of humans and humanoids living together. There is a cube-like structure representing their ship, objects from the planet in glass cabinets with special – perhaps dangerous – powers and an unseen bureaucratic power called the Organisation with shades of Big Brother.
Characters are followed around the cube by camera operators, their footage projected on to screens outside. So we have a 360-degree view of them, although we cannot go inside the cube, where they eat, argue and grow increasingly entwined in each other’s lives.
Directed by Łukasz Twarkowski, this is monumental, visually arresting theatre that both sucks you into its world and pushes you out at once. With dazzling music (Lubomir Grzelak) and lighting (Bartosz Nalazek and Svenja Gassen), it feels immersive – even though you are looking at the characters from outside. While the screens bring a distancing effect, the thrum of the music feels like we are within the juddering spaceship.
The story is told through disjointed reports, from dull daily routines to the romances that grow between humans and androids (reminiscent of Blade Runner) and, later, rebellion. This adaptation plays down the satire of the book and goes for a brooding visual quality instead. While this has a hypnotic effect, the story feels too fragmentary. There is great intensity to the performances by Dominika Biernat, Daniel Dobosz, Maja Pankiewicz, Sonia Roszczuk and Paweł Smagała but their characters are not coloured in; you are interested in them, rather than moved by them.
The growing humanity of the humanoids is the focus here, with all the resonances of current debates – and fears – around artificial intelligence. Some androids insist that they feel and remember things, though they are programmed not to. For a while, you wonder if their machine intelligence has adapted itself or if they are simply pretending. Many questions are floated but not considered deeply enough, and the objects in the glass cases are also not explored sufficiently.
There is exquisite world-building, though, including the cohort eating flavourless food in the canteen and their reminiscences about life on Earth, from its aromas to gravity itself. In the show’s many micro-intervals, characters dance outside the cube as if at a rave. It is the antithesis of their sedentary movements onboard the ship and seems as if they are in the grip of a fugitive energy. The house and rave sounds have a bass so deep that it is rousing and disturbing in equal measure. The story’s arc might feel truncated but The Employees is extravagant event theatre, with transporting effects.
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