Review: EATING JEFF, Camden People's Theatre

We're in one of those horrendous team-bonding sessions at a gigantic corporation where staff are jumbled out of their silos and forced to mix - usually like oil and water. There's a go-getter, the dumb blonde (who isn't blonde), a union rabble-rouser and a disaffected IT guy. And, unseen but ever-present, moving between the penthouse office suite and the basement sauna, is the boss - who happens to be called Jeff.

For half the show's snappy 70 minutes or so runtime, we get a fairly standard office bickering and bitching comedy, with a little old-school Marxism and flirting thrown into the mix. But soon - a pivot! - and we go into something sitting between French farce and Grand Guignol. It's a heady mix that shows plenty of ambition and some of it comes off beautifully, even if the writing to set it up the crucial moment and then to explore fully its comic potential isn't quite up to creating characters that retain credibility either side of the step into surrealism.

The young cast (Guillaume Doussin, Melissa Wilson, Alphonso Brown and Florence Oliveira) have devised something that owes a little to the 1970s French film La Grande Bouffe and a little to grassroots 2020s political activism (as well as 17th century Molière) and all of them can time a laugh line. It should never be underestimated just how difficult it is to use comedy to make satirical points, so their efforts are laudable, if not quite there yet in terms of sharpness in the plotting and focus on character.

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