Review: The Pulverised, York Theatre Royal

The organisation isn’t named, but it doesn’t need to be. There are a thousand like it which claim to value its workforce, but whose staff are reduced to little more than a number.

Written by French-Romanian playwright Alexandra Badea and newly translated here by Lucy Phelps, through short vignettes The Pulverised tells the story of four employees.

There’s the high flying exec (Richard Corgan) who has sacrificed time with his young family for a life mostly spent in airport lounges and drinking whiskey in identikit hotel rooms. Then there’s the research worker (Kate Miles) who desperately wants to be recognised as a consummate professional, but who is also a mother riddled with guilt.

Thousands of miles away in Senegal, a young man in a cheap suit (Solomon Israel) has swallowed his employer’s mission statements, but ultimately discovers that no human life can be valued above profits. The quartet is completed by Rebecca Boey, a worker in one of the corporation’s Chinese factories where suicide rates are high and where all hope for a better future has been quietly extinguished.

It’s compelling stuff as each tell their own story of being caught in a life from which the only escape appears to be complete mental breakdown or death. Beautifully staged and performed, it’s also a story of our time and a world where we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

To June 10. 01904 623568, yorktheatreroyal.co.uk