4 days ago
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fun and refreshingly anarchic, but more valiant revolt than workplace revolution
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4
Peacock stage, Abbey Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
Set in the sterile, fluorescent-lit vacuum that is the office of an anonymous Irish fund-management firm, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is a new play by Caitríona Daly that explores the absurdity of corporate life with humour and chaos. Ronán Duffy's design perfectly captures that nowhere aesthetic: cool-toned, clean and soulless. The details are crushingly well observed: unopened water bottles, swivel chairs and token charity teddy bears.
Three employees are locked in Conference Room 4 during lunch to decide how to spend the company's annual corporate social-responsibility budget. Ambitious Clodagh (Caoimhe O'Malley) and rural outsider Daniel (Fionn Foley) are unexpectedly joined by Jess (Emma Dargan-Reid), a new receptionist pulled in under the false pretence of a team-building exercise.
What unfolds in Raymond Keane's production is a descent into role-play and theatrical mayhem as they audition proposals, from saving the bees to sponsoring a GAA club in Offaly, in a half-baked gameshow-style competition. Meanwhile, a frenzied HR rep, Susan (Helen Norton), makes comic attempts to regain control.
The play skewers the hollowness of corporate ethics, presenting them as less about morality than about optics. When Jess suggests directing funds toward more urgent causes – medical aid for Gaza, domestic-abuse services, poverty relief – she's met with deflection. Clodagh briskly explains that the company has a Tel Aviv office, the chief executive has an abuse conviction and giving money to poor people would draw too much media scrutiny.
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The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fionn Foley, Emma Dargan-Reid and Caoimhe O'Malley. Photograph: Rich Davenport
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Emma Dargan-Reid as Jess. Photograph: Rich Davenport
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4: Fionn Foley as Daniel. Photograph: Rich Davenport
At this point, Jess, depicted as a caricature of a left-wing millennial, erupts in unconvincing rage. Even if she didn't know the specifics of the company's shady dealings, her shock feels disingenuous. We live in a world where corporate evil is no longer surprising but regarded with quiet, beaten-down apathy and irony.
A more compelling play might have explored why the real-life Jess might have known all this and taken the job anyway. Our collective resignation, not outrage, is the more urgent moral dilemma.
The play's structure, alternating wild improvisation with moments of emotional honesty, is both its strength and its flaw. There's real energy in the madness: Daniel dons a princess dress and peroxide wig to play a Trump-supporting southern belle named Tiffany; Clodagh transforms into a brittle talkshow host in sunglasses and a feather boa. There's military cosplay, Mario Kart references and layers of silliness.
None of it needs to make sense: it's driven by the Bacchic release of characters seeking escape from soul-crushing monotony. The performances are uniformly strong, and the sense of play is genuine.
Still, the production's loose form eventually undercuts its themes. It builds to a climax that offers no explanations, only an unnecessary burst of metatheatre and a choreographed dance to Tame Impala. Why Tame Impala? A giddy embrace of the meaninglessness we now inhabit? It borders on the hysterical, a distraction from the questions the play raises but can't resolve.
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is fun and refreshingly anarchic. But its wildness, its best and most unusual quality, is also its undoing. A valiant, messy, entertaining lunchtime revolt, but not a revolution.
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 is at the
Abbey Theatre
, Dublin, until Saturday, September 6th
