Review: JOBSWORTH, Park Theatre

If you’ve ever worked a remote job, and been strapped for cash, you’ll recognise the temptation to take on additional casual work on the side. Isley Lynn and Libby Rodliffe take this concept to its extreme in their one-woman show, Jobsworth.

In this Edinburgh Fringe hit, Rodliffe stars as Bea, a corporate PA doing her ‘remote’ job while simultaneously working the reception desk of a block of luxury flats, forever flitting between Zoom calls and lying about her whereabouts. It transpires that this is an elaborate scheme to help her father, the eccentric owner of several snakes, out of severe debt after taking payday loans.

In tackling all this, Rodliffe’s performance style is as frenetic as Bea’s work schedule – don’t let Matthew Cassar’s clean, minimalistic set design, an odd choice for this show, fool you. Rodliffe moves at a mile a minute, switching between regional accents for a dizzying cast of characters with practiced ease. It’s often difficult to follow exactly where Bea is or whom she’s talking to, allowing us to spiral out of control along with our protagonist.

At times, it does feels like there’s slightly too much going on, as though some ideas were taken from a more loosely formatted sketch show and slotted awkwardly into the narrative. In a mere 80 minutes, Lynn and Rodliffe find time for blackmail, a scandal about not paying contractors, Bea taking on a third and fourth job, and even a romantic subplot between Bea and the “fit temp” Niall (“because every time he’s near me it’s like flood season”, one of many effortlessly delivered one-liners).

This lack of focus sometimes means we don’t learn as much as we should about Bea before she took on her father’s debt, aside from a clunky backstory about her parents and a few snippets of voice notes from friends. The tragicomic ending, again revolving around Bea’s family, thus doesn’t quite hit with the emotional punch it should, because Bea’s complex relationship with her parents has been hinted at rather than probed in full.

Still, Lynn and Rodliffe’s intelligent satirical script does more than just endlessly lampoon the concept of having multiple jobs. Bea’s boss at her PA job, Julian – who finds out about her ruse because he’s sleeping with an influencer who lives in one of the luxury flats – manages to be more than a mere caricature, and the writing is subtle and sinister in how it reveals his casual exploitation of his employees. Meanwhile, Bea’s wealthy friend India makes a brief cameo that’s rife with callousness and lack of empathy towards her financial situation.

In the end, Jobsworth offers its protagonist no easy way out of the web of lies and further debt she’s found herself in. The lengths we go to to make ends meet in 2025 might be a fine comic premise, but in these writers’ hands, it morphs into something else: a bleak portrait of how no amount of gaming the system can ever allow us to overcome its hurdles.

Jobsworth plays at Park Theatre until 6 December