HOT PEPPER, AIR CONDITIONER, AND THE FAREWELL SPEECH

Job Insecurity
Workers discuss restaurant arrangements for a colleague who has been fired. A young woman complains to her male colleague about the air conditioner being turned down. A woman who has been laid off gives her farewell speech. Under an apparent banality, these three situations illustrate the distress and disarray of a society falling apart.

The Japanese artist Toshiki Okada sculpts the language of young workers who have been duped, their hopes dashed, echoing the chopped, plain and repetitive speech of Tokyo youth. The performers’ bodies jolt with convulsive movements, tossing and turning under stark lighting to disconcerting jazz music. At a loss for words, disconnected from their bodies, the portrayal is caustic and the humour offbeat in a tale of youth lost in an air-conditioned nightmare.

The playwright and director is a rising star on the international theatre scene. He expresses the malaise – no job security, uncertain prospects – and obvious despair of a generation that had been promised a brilliant future, in a pitiless portrait that rings true. In both East and West, instability is yet another product of globalization.