Review: Dial at Seven Arts Centre

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It’s no joke working in a call centre. Whenever I’m forced to talk to some relentlessly upbeat and earnest customer services representative about my broken broadband, the leak in my bathroom, or another inadvertently late credit card payment it doesn’t sound like they are doing it for a laugh. The people who chose to work in call centres are a special breed. They sound as though they have had every last kink and wrinkle of faulty humanity steam ironed out of them. You can’t imagine them falling off their chair chuckling if you accidentally choked on a blueberry muffin while complaining about the two hour wait you had to endure on the emergency hot-line. They always listen patiently, keep emotional control, empathise, communicate openly, focus on the future, and look for solutions to meet needs you didn’t even know you had. Well, that’s what they would have us believe.

Of course it isn’t really like that. It’s just a front, a pretense, a swindle. My guess is that it’s more like the world portrayed in Dial, which the writer describes as, “a dystopian vision of transacted emotions and diminishing morality.” Behind the scripted, sanitised and saccharine surface there’s a heck of a lot of messy, miserable and misanthropic games that people are playing. All that emotional manipulation comes at a cost. Dial dramatises what happens when the mask slips and people reveal what they are really thinking. Each character has their own way of dealing with an essentially pointless occupation, their own individual path to psychological unravelling.

The play is set in an office of Soul Savers, a company which takes calls from desperate individuals and points them towards counselling services. Soul Savers profits directly from human misery. The world has an inexhaustible supply of misery so the market can be milked aggressively and the trick is to make the punter pay for a meeting with a professional soul saver. Of course, this isn’t a fee or a cost, it’s an “investment.” The punter will recoup the money spent after the professional has worked his magic. That message is cynically repeated all throughout the play.  The manager, Carol, and her team of Joshi, Patty and Matt, are out to snare as many punters as possible and so make it up the Soul Savers leader board. It sounds grim but in fact it was very funny. There are plenty of good one-liners and enough smut, swearing, and slapstick to keep even a hen party from Hartlepool entertained.

Carol (Gemma Head) identifies totally with the values and vision, mission and Unique Selling Point of Soul Savers. She could probably recite company policy and practice word for word. She’s the sort of person who sees a box and has to tick it. If she were ever to find herself in a box she’d instantly hop outside it and look up at the blue sky, thoughtfully. What she would do if she were ever caught inside an unticked box is hard to imagine. Spontaneously combust probably. One of the funniest moments is when Carol decides to train her staff in customer care. She flip-charts an acronym, SAD GHOST, which is meant to help remind staff how to handle callers:

Greet and be sweet
Hear and be clear
Own and don’t groan
Sift for the gift
Trap and then wrap

This had me chuckling with recognition. It’s so close to the truth it is excruciating. I recently did some Customer Care Training for a large public sector organisation where I concocted a Customer Relations Appreciation Plan and rolled out some Simulated Human Interaction Training. The people who pander to that kind of stuff tend to have the intellectual acumen of Tinky Winky. Carol totally buys into the whole thing. It is hard to feel sorry for her. Her team don’t rate her.

Joshie (Dermot Daly) doesn’t really like his job but still knuckles down. His strategy to get through the working day is to keep his head down, keep busy, and keep out of trouble. This makes him an unwitting poster boy for Carol’s schemes and an easy target for office jibes. Joshie’s problem is that he’s not only conscientious, he really does give a damn about the people on the other end of the phone. His vulnerability is in stark contrast to his other two colleagues.

Patty (Victoria Morris) gets through her day mostly gossiping and messing around. She does her job, reluctantly, and usually only if Carol is watching. A lot of the time she is daydreaming of being somewhere else, escaping to a more glamourous life, or going along with any distraction her coworkers can think up. For Patty the job is meaningless. She has no connection with any of the people she talks to on the phones. Not that she’s intentionally mean or nasty, she just doesn’t consider them as individuals.

The rowdiest member of the team is Matt (Jamie Smelt.) He is the joker, disruptive, dirty talking, a bit of a lad, constantly undermining whatever initiative Carol wants to push, and probably the character the audience have most empathy with. At least he’s having a go, standing up to infantilizing authority, never leaving any moronic acronym or depressingly jocular team-building exercise unmolested by his quick wit. He’s allowed to get away with an awful lot of flirtatious and salacious behaviour simply because he’s funny. He gets all the best jokes. At least in the first half of the play.

The turning point comes when Carol organises a team night out. We’ve all been on at least one of these, when you have to drink five double JD and coke’s, a whole tray of Revolution vodka shots, and the contents of the toilet fire hydrant, just to cope. It’s never pleasant. Then the secrets tumble out. And the chance of sexual shenanegans is odds on. Joshie didn’t turn up. Carol spills something she shouldn’t. Patty does something she oughtn’t. Matt is laughing. The jokes end and the drama begins.

Matt’s transformation from a try-hard, irritating loser with all the sexual charisma of a Vileda mop, into a nasty, brutish, but still very short, bastard is impressive. He swaggers on stage after the break in grotty t-shirt announcing that he has information about Carol, information that makes him invulnerable. And he’s obviously enjoyed some kind of illicit relation in the park with Patty. This makes him into a mini-Mussolini and the audience are one in wanting to see him swing from the nearest lamppost. The most disturbing scene in the play, one that is genuinely difficult to watch, is when Carol asks for contributions to a “dress up your manager” day and Matt obliges by assaulting her . . . there really is no other word for it. He rips open her shirt, smears her make-up, and throws a glass of water over her. All in the name of “involvement.” It is gruelling. Patty then decides to ask to read the poem she’s written about Matt.

For me, this is the only serious weak point of the play. Not that it’s badly done. Patty reads the piece beautifully. So well in fact it almost carried me along. But it does sound like it was written in a vicarage, in the C19, in front of a log fire with crumpets toasting on long forks, by a spinster with a terminal case of neurasthenia. I mean, it sounded a bit out of place. Matt needed verbally trouncing not slathered in sentimental, effete meanderings. The poem should have squelched him. Instead, what we get is the cliche’d romantic syrupy stuff about “creative writing.” Patty escaped Soul Savers. She got on a creative writing course, which means she’ll never have to think of Souls Savers or anything like it ever again. It’s all Greek mythology, high minded romantic twaddle and long-winded, long forgotten diction. Creative writing is about stuff that’s entirely irrelevant. None of the people who needed to ring Soul Savers would have any use for it. And that’s a shame because it’s the only escape on offer from the dystopia of Dial. Part of me wishes that Joshie had joined the union. That will never happen though.

Apart from that minor, mealy mouthed criticism, Dial was a real treat. The writing was sharp, the acting was faultless, and the theatre was lovely. Top evening. Better than the telly.