Jane has been stood down from her job at a large tech firm because of a viral video. She cannot return to her employer until a therapist has signed off to say she is fit for work. But as lights come up on Max Wolf Friedlich’s new play, Job, Jane is holding a gun on Lloyd, the man who has her future in his hands.
It’s a bold opening moment, thrust into a crisis before we know what the situation is. It’s disconcerting. The audience has to find their feet the way Lloyd must as well. What has driven Jane to this point? How have things spiralled so far out of control? And how can he talk her down and help her out the other side?
What unfolds is a play that unpacks a lot of things about how we live online and how that barrage of information can affect us. Jane talks about how brilliant her phone is and how miraculous it is to carry around an encyclopaedia of knowledge and art. Lloyd tries to temper this with caution, but Jane is terminally online and can’t see past this vital part of her lifestyle.
The text of the play starts things turned up all the way to 11 and Nadia Tass’ production at Red Stitch attempts to keep the tension at that level for seventy-five minutes. It’s unrelenting. Jessica Clarke gives Jane a potent and compelling physicality, while the dialogue fires off between her and Darren Gilshenan’s Lloyd.
Gilshenan performance is robust, giving as good as he gets. But there’s never any let-up. Even when the situation calms down – the gun goes away or the two of them sit, the text never lets up. Revelations fly thick and fast. Accusations and recriminations keep the audience on edge.
Jacob Battista’s set is both a naturalistic East Coast therapist’s office and – with curtains instead of walls – it also suggests an imprecise liminal space; a purgatory these two characters are trapped in. David Parker’s lighting is bright and stark for most of the show, but the unnerving blackouts combined with snatches of indistinct noise in Daniel Nixon’s sound design makes for some moments of visceral terror.
Late in the play, as Jane opens up about the trouble she’s had at work – the meltdown that circulated online was filmed at her work where she does “content moderation”, Friedlich has Jane recite the disturbing and despicable things she’s seen on the internet.
She’s not just blocking people for hate speech or deleting videos of copyright violation, she’s at the coalface for finding and deleting the worst shit imaginable. Videos of murder and bestiality and child pornography.
It comes too late for the play to interrogate the real price of giving our lives over to social media companies and million-dollar search engines to keep us connected and functioning. This situation Jane finds herself in is compelling; it’s a rich vein of drama.
Discussing how people define themselves by their work and how they get subsumed by that during late-stage capitalism is fascinating. But it feels so nihilistic to present the problem and to leave the audience without catharsis. Perhaps that’s the point, but I found it so frustrating.
I’ve seen a number of shows this year that have reckoned with the flood of information we deal with in our everyday lives. In Job, playing everything at a heightened pitch replicates doomscrolling to an unrelenting degree.
Tonally and dramatically, the production plateaus in the second half and the shouting no longer feels like desperate wrestling between two well-drawn characters. It flattened into noise. There’s a fascinating provocation at the centre of this work, but I found it difficult to see past the arguments of both the characters and the playwright.
JOB
Red Stitch Theatre, Rear 2 Chapel Street, St Kilda East
Performance: Wednesday 17 September 2025
Season continues to 12 October 2025
Information and Bookings: www.redstitch.net
Images: Jessica Clarke and Darren Gilshenan in JOB – photo by Sarah Walker | Darren Gilshenan and Jessica Clarke in JOB – photo by Sarah Walker
Review: Keith Gow