Review: Tracer

The New Theatre, Dublin

**

On the face of it, the huge Dublin-based market research company at the centre of Stewart Roche’s new play isn’t such a bad place to work. The hours are flexible, the pay is all right, it almost always seems to be Friday and smoke breaks are near constant. Okay, the boss is an overbearing headache and co-workers are evenly split between angels and demons, but there is a brisk traffic in international transfers: colleagues keep disappearing forever.

This catches the attention of Richard (Patrick O’Donnell), a documentary maker specialising in recording geek culture, who has come to make some cash in the firm’s coding department. His efforts are first placed in decoding the corporate world, however, which is also Roche’s fascination.

"You guys can go smart-casual," instructs tie-wearing line manager Simon Toal, and the play outlines everything from boozy Friday after-work socials to frequent office downsizing and jargon that becomes ever more sinister. What, for example, is "advanced HR solutions"?

There is an art to generating suspense, which requires even innocuous set-ups to seem taut, but the elements of Roche’s corporate conspiracy satire are in clashing competition with each other. The wonderfully deadpan Toal, for instance, finds laughs everywhere, but he often seems to be subverting the entire production. The most comedic part – the amateur sleuthing of Richard, nice guy Campbell (Stephen Kelly) and romantic interest Deborah (Ranae Von Meding) – is played deadly serious. Neither the pace nor the clues are carefully measured, however, so the first act feels flat with slack realism where mysterious details feel less intriguing than simply delayed.

Director Jeda de Brí works with a surfeit of characters (“You probably don’t need me for this,” asks one of them early on, and it’s hard to contradict her) and a see-saw of styles to bring us towards a surreal conclusion. That may suggest an eruptive fantasy on behalf of Richard, the creative guy warned about succumbing to corporate convention, but the play would rather make it a political satire encompassing everything from transnational unaccountability to Irish complicity in the darkest crimes of geopolitics. It’s a vertiginous ascent of paranoia that no one can quite keep hold of, a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top.

Until September 6