The Maria, Young Vic, London

© Simon Annand

Mike Bartlett has a habit of showing human behaviour as people pitted against each others as though in a boxing or bull ring (Cock, My Child). It makes for shuddering if compulsive theatre. He can also pen the expansive such as the sprawling Earthquakes in London or the hilarious fantasy on a theme of our next and future monarch, King Charles III. Bull falls into his intimate schema à la Cock. As you enter the Young Vic’s Maria studio space, it has all the atmosphere of a noisy corrida/outdoor concert/or boxing ring; tiers of seating – and standing – around a square ring backed by loud, amped music geared to send audiences either into headbanging numbness or, climaxing in Queen’s We Will Rock You, unadulterated ecstasy. By the time the cast enter, the atmosphere is hyper, at fever pitch. Three characters congregate around an office water fountain. Tony, Isobel, Thomas. Tony has the upper hand – in Adam James’ smooth and smirking tormentor. So too Eleanor Matsuura’s Isobel, never missing a beat. The object of their goading is Sam Troughton’s Thomas. Troughton has played many a doughty RSC Shakespearean foot-soldier in his time. Here, he has all the clumsiness of the outsider and inevitable victim, the employee who is to be sacked in an exercise of downsizing. Like a wounded bull, it is only a matter of time before the three `matadors’ – Tony and Isobel augmented by the presence of senior exec, the always dependably malevolent Neil Stuke – reduce him to a shuddering wreck. Office politics and the artful craft of emotional bullying was never so brutally or so succinctly portrayed as in this short 55 minutes, culminating in the final coup de grace. Bartlett catches all the subtlety – and cruelty – of office game-playing. And the audience, from laughing at the expertise with which Tony and Isobel play their victim, gradually grow more silent as the awfulness – and maybe their own reflection – becomes palpable in Thomas’s demise. As Isobel glibly and without guilt puts it: `Tony and me we’re really horrible to you…I think it’s instinct…goes on all the time…everywhere. I think it’s actually how things are supposed to be.’ Positively Darwinian. First published in Reviewsgate in Jan 2015;