Review: LONDON ZOO, Southwark Playhouse

Time magazine’s first Person of the Year 1999 (a sign of the times a’changing, as 72 years of Man of the Year ceded to non-sexist language) was Jeff Bezos, CEO of what many of us still considered an ambitious bookshop; Amazon. But broadband was rolling out and the chattering class’s soi-disant second industrial revolution was underway, a disruptive technology doing its disrupting.

In newspapers, long a cash cow for media tycoons, a resistance to the impact of the web was giving way to the idea of ‘convergence’, the migrating of content and advertising to online platforms. It was inevitable that it was going to happen, but how could anyone make any money? 

We reap the whirlwind today, with an emaciated and cowed newspaper industry bullied by politicians, yet still held in low regard  due to its dodgy ethics. On the other hand, with entry barriers all but eliminated, there’s never been more to read, to see and to hear - which has, naturally, brought its own problems.

It is against that background that Farine Clarke’s black comedy, London Zoo, returns to the stage after its 2021 run, with its boardroom squabbling, its raw sexism and its cost cutting managers.

Harris Vaughan plays Christian, a go-getting, amoral publishing executive whose own empire is sliding into losses. He has eyed a small but profitable magazine to acquire from Kelvin (Odimegwu Okoye) who is a hands-off owner, keen to allow his editorial team to get on with it. It’s a clash of business cultures, but it soon becomes more than that, after Sunil (Anirban Roy) displays barely concealed racism towards Kelvin, who is black, to the naive astonishment of his staff, who cannot conceive of such an attitude residing in a British Asian man.

Meanwhile, Charles (Simon Furness), a strait-laced, long-serving accountant, is being harangued by his boss, the shouty American can-doer Alex (Dan Saski), required to cut corners on a takeover plan and conceal true intentions. That tips disaffected MD, Arabella (Natalie Lauren) over the edge and a crisis brews as the board meets to approve the strategy.

There’s a lot of issues flung into this comic mix. Alongside the racism - Okoye channeling Sidney Poitier as Mr Tibbs in meeting it with controlled disgust - we get sexism. workplace bullying, the lingering impact of childhood trauma, dubious business ethics and even a bit of an old school frame up. In covering so much ground in a 110 minutes show that might work better without its 20 minutes interval, plenty of stuff gets mentioned, but nothing gets explored. That’s a missed opportunity, especially when the gruesome Christian slides into a kind of reverie recalling a childhood trauma - I’m sure I was not alone in thinking of certain Tory MPs at that moment.

The play’s pace never really settles, with too much talk of spreadsheets underling what we already know about each character’s ease or otherwise in the dodgy dealing and longish blackouts to facilitate set changes giving way to a denouement that feels rushed, leaving too many plot lines hanging in the air.

But there are laughs, some from the sharp tang of satire, some from the recognition that the caricatures we see are not so far away from people with whom we have worked in the past. There is an element that feels dated (the play was written in 2007) in a post financial crisis, post The Office, post The Apprentice, post Trump world, in which our perspectives on what Tom Wolfe called the Masters of the Universe in the Bonfire of the Vanities have changed considerably. 

Comedies are tricky to pitch perfectly, especially those as ambitious in their thematic scope as this one, and it’s far too easy for reviewers to bemoan the elements that land askew rather than praise the ones that hit home. This production will loosen a bit after opening night, hit its targets harder and find the laughlines more naturally. It will entertain its audience, who won’t get another skincrawling David Brent, but will be amused plenty and given a bit to think about as to whether the business attitudes rooted in the last century have really been dispelled a quarter of the way through this one.           

London Zoo at Southwark Playhouse until 30 March

Photo Credits: Lidia Crisafulli

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