Agency

Los temporales
by Lucía Carballal (Spain), 2016
Two female, three male.

 

 

Olivia has had enough.  She’s stressed, doing her best, and her colleagues don’t care.  Much less, her bosses.  When even pretending to collapse at work doesn’t make them change their ways, she’s all set to walk out the door.  But the right-on recruitment agency she works for has a better idea:  workplace therapy, with role-play and offloading included.  Well-being training to match the compulsory cheer of staff ping-pong tables and fake, indoor grass.  Follow your dreams and find fulfillment!  What could possibly go wrong that hasn’t already?  In a riotous satire for the modern workplace, where corporate capitalism dominates and the staff are as desperate as the unemployed clients whose CVs they dutifully ‘optimise’, how much agency do any of us really have?

If you only knew…  the damage you’re all doing.  You have no idea.  The ones who listen to you lot are the weakest, and it’s because of people like you that they all get left behind.  All lying in bed, projecting.  ‘I’m wishing, I’m wishing, just look at me wishing.’  Instead of going to German classes.  Instead of packing their bags and getting out, which is what they ought to do.  In the real world there are things, there are walls, there are virtues you have and flaws you have to hide, you know?  Flaws you have to hide.  People grow up, they brush their hair, they leave their hobbies behind and they get real jobs.  Because a hobby, Samuel, is not the same as a job.  A hobby is making little paper birds and tying them together in a garland!  A hobby doesn’t pay for your therapist!

Trailer from the Madrid production at the National Theatre of Spain, 2016.

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