A sharp, direct dissection of hierarchy, control and violence, writer Alfie Pullum’s The Postcode Lottery provides a captivating hour of entertainment. Director Maisie Bayliss and assistant director Charlie Rider successfully brought out the play’s equal capacity for humour and brutality, pushing its narrative of exploitation to emotional and physical limits.
In a chain of workplace episodes, the power dynamic between customer and employee is interrogated. Privilege and prejudice topple into domino-effects of violence, and entitlement provokes reaction from those that can least afford to suffer its consequences.
Edward (Harry Petts) and Henry (Joe White) act as catalysts, progressing from obnoxious, class-based micro-aggressions to outright harassment. Their targets, spa therapists Jodie (Jasmine Davis) and Ashley (Carlita Rahaman), bite their tongues, before resentment breeds retaliation. Petts’ and White’s dynamic was particularly effective, utilising the script’s comedic potential: Petts is the toadying doormat to White’s lewd arrogance, hinting at Edward’s twisted socio-sexual inclinations revealed later.
Equally strong was the relationship between Rahaman and Davis, demonstrating keenly where self-respect, fear and necessity conflict. Pacing could possibly have been heightened to sustain the tension, but nonetheless the four’s nuanced characterisation – such as Rahaman’s foreshadowing of Ashley’s internalised cruelty – created a palpably intimidating atmosphere.
Interspersed scenes of physical theatre: cast members performing vignettes of primal, hunting creatures, accompanied by dark, animalistic soundscapes did balance the intense dialogue. Presumably, these were fairly overt metaphors for predators, hierarchy, and dominance, but the literal low levels of the sequences obscured them from a large section of the audience.
Ashley’s and Jodie’s victimhood is soon subverted, as they in turn become abusive customers. A similarly obnoxious, light-hearted exchange takes place, again to the aggravation of employees Mei (Hannah Diarra) and Naomi (Beth Pitt). Whilst appropriate to the play’s setting, I didn’t quite catch the London-centric references, which audience members outside the capital could find alienating. The pacing here, however, was quicker and felt spontaneous and more human. Pitt’s flustered, innocent complicity added welcome comedic depth to avoid too heavy a repetition of the previous scene.
This time in the hairdressers, Diarra presented Mei as a childish, ignorant counterpart to her resilient stand in the salon, compounding the play’s critique of hypocrisy. Meanwhile Sarah (Merle Fraser) typifies the perceived lowest rung of the social order, a ‘whore’, in Mei’s insistent opinion – ‘sex-worker’ in her own.
Fraser’s tired patience elicited great sympathy from the audience, and the climactic dominatrix scene rewards the wait to get there. Completing the cyclical ecosystem, Sarah tears into Edward physically and verbally. Whimpering and leather-harness strapped, Petts’s meek, cringing delivery expertly toed the line between farce and satire. This could easily have been no more than a crude laugh at the resulting image alone, but Petts infused this absurdity with a disturbing sincerity.
Fraser saturates Sarah’s punishment of Edward with a feeling of real relish, unleashing the play’s long-accumulated hatred. Yet Sarah leaves defeated, realising his ‘disciplining’ is merely an erotic game, a thrilling fantasy from which he can withdraw at any time – even when she wins, she loses. This bizarre scene is by far the most powerful, and most convincing. Where earlier dialogue could feel exaggerated and almost cartoonish, Sarah manages to shoulder the tragedy of systemic cruelty with gravity.
Successful in its clear message and style, and certainly evocative, The Postcode Lottery featured some of the strongest performances of the UMDS Autumn Fringe.
