Review: JOB at Q Theatre

Silo Theatre’s Auckland production of Job, playing at Q Theatre’s Loft, is a superb rendering of the Broadway hit — a two-hander that earns every ounce of its reputation. Walking in tired on opening night, I fully expected to coast through the evening. Instead, I found myself pinned to my seat, unwilling to miss a beat of this psychological thriller.

I’d recently seen Silo’s Constellations and considered it the top of the tops for two-person theatre — so I doubted anything else in that format could pull me in the same way. I was both right and wrong. Job enthralled me every bit as much, but in a far more uncomfortable register: an “I want to close my eyes but I can’t miss a second” kind of tension that never lets up.

Much of that power comes from a finely nuanced script. Playwright Max Wolf Friedlich has a gift for architecting arguments with an intellectual ease, constructing the dialogue with seemingly throwaway digressions and micro-stories that appear unrelated, only to reveal themselves later as the bigger picture. 

The sheer ingenuity of the writing keeps you leaning in, compelled and ‘thinkingly’ disoriented in equal measure, with no real sense of where the story is headed until it’s already arrived.

Olivia Tennet, as the tech-world patient Jane, and Stephen Lovatt, as her therapist Loyd, are extraordinary. Their scenes together crackle with an escalating unease, each shift in power between them landing like a small shock. 

This is an uncomfortably compelling psychological thriller — one that stares unflinchingly at the worst of human nature as it’s amplified and warped by the dark web, and at the quiet, corrosive pain of trying to do good in a system that keeps punishing it. 

Shane Bosher‘s direction is razor-sharp, controlling the pace so precisely that the play’s tonal swings — from stinging humour to devastating stillness.

The design team deserves real credit too: John Verryt’s set and Sean Lynch’s lighting build a pressure-cooker space that does as much storytelling as the dialogue itself.

A word of caution before you book: this is not a light night out. Silo is upfront about it with their own content transparency notes flagging coarse language and references to distressing adult themes, along with the use of a weapon on stage, loud sound effects, haze, and bright and strobe lighting. The show carries a clear R16+ recommendation, and given its subject matter; mental health crisis, workplace trauma, and the darker undercurrents of online life, it could genuinely be triggering for some audience members. 

Silo publishes a fuller, spoiler-inclusive content guide for anyone who wants to check specifics before the show, and it’s well worth a look if you’re sensitive to any of the above.

What surprised me was I kept finding parallels with the Book of Job. On the surface the connection is only a name and a pun; this Job is about a tech job, a workplace incident, nothing biblical. But the parallels crept up on me anyway. There’s the same relentless back-and-forth of plea bargaining, of two people trying to negotiate their way toward an acceptable version of the truth. There’s the same sense of getting lost in the arguments themselves; circling justification, doubt, and blame until you’re no longer sure who’s right, only that the arguing has become its own kind of suffering. Watching Jane and Loyd spar was, unexpectedly, not unlike watching Job wrestle with his comforters: the logic keeps shifting, but the pain underneath it never does.

Job holds a magnificent, albeit uncomfortable, tension and Silo Theatre has delivered a production well worth losing sleep over — go in with eyes open and immerse yourself.

Silo Theatre Presents:

Reader Reviews

To post a comment, you must register and login.

Don't Miss a New Zealand News Story
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...