work.txt (Modern Plays)

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Nathan Ellis is a writer for stage and screen. In 2020 his play Super High Resolution was shortlisted for the Verity Bargate Award run by the Soho Theatre, coming in the top six out of 1500 submitted plays. His plays include No One Is Coming to Save You (a 'blazing debut' (the Guardian), published by Oberon) and work.txt (**** the Guardian). In 2021, he made Still Life, a digital play series commissioned by Nottingham Playhouse. He has TV projects in development with Greenacre Films and Balloon Entertainment. He is represented by Giles Smart at United Agents and is based between London and Berlin. This one-woman monologue weaves a brutally unapologetic tapestry of a woman’s inner psyche. The polarisation of corporeal and mental suffering is devastating. Both are balanced perfectly; each sphere of her trauma is a planet revolving around her. Read our full review here. Photo: Lottie Amor Writer Nathan Ellis is a member of the BBC Drama Room and has several television projects in development. On stage he is known for his debut No One Is Coming to Save You as well as the critically acclaimed work.txt – a play without actors. Now under the direction of Blanche McIntyre, Soho Theatre will present the world premiere of Super High Resolution. The play, which focuses on the NHS, was shortlisted for the prestigious Verity Bargate Award, the judging panel of which included Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Ellis took time out to speak with us about his latest theatrical offering. There are so many budding writers but it’s an incredibly competitive field and one that’s notoriously hard to break into. What advice would you give to someone hoping to write a script and get it out there?

It opens with the usual Dublin Fringe Festival notice: welcome to the show, please take note of emergency exits and switch off mobile phones. Meanwhile, words are projected on to the wall of the theatre telling the audience to ignore the instructions and to leave their phones on. This sets the tone for the show, with the projection acting as a sort of all-seeing eye.There’s a way of participating in this play that would leave you feeling like you had completely torn apart the concept of work. That you, with your fellow audience members-turned-performers, had laboured in ways that were fun, productive, new. That was not the way I experienced it. For me, it was a precise and detailed answer to the question ‘how are we made to work without conscious intention or realisation?’, delivered by making me do work without conscious intention and only a slowly dawning realisation. The indistinctness of work in modern society does not simply result in ‘working too much’ but in a deeper problem that creates the need to overwork. As our work becomes less visible, we feel that we are not working enough, must work harder. Simultaneously, the fruits of our labours become increasingly obscured, making it more difficult for us to recognise the value in our work. Are you the type of writer who carries a pen and pad around waiting for inspiration to strike, or do you actively go looking for stories? His father is also a musician and released an album in 2007 called ‘Virtues In Us’ in both English and Chinese. Say It Again, Sorry? present a delightfully interactive and uproariously funny take on Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest. A feast for Fringe-goers of all levels of experience. Read the full review here. Photo: Dylan Silk

At a few moments in the play, you will wonder where all of this will lead, and what the whole point of it is. And then you might realise that the play can’t really lead anywhere because there is no point to our work culture. There isn’t a point to spending most of our days in an office – maybe one should just lie down. He is in a friend group called 이즈 (ee-z) with Stray Kids I.N, Enhypen Heeseung and Just B Lim Jimin. (Beomgyu’s vLive – Dec 2, 2021) Besides which: it was a great piece of theatre. It was gripping, satisfying, discomforting, with an elusive glimmer of hope I couldn’t quite catch, but knew I would go on seeking.

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Acting on stage can provide an immediate response to your work as the audience applaud – writing is a far more isolated endeavour. Do you find solace in that, or do you yearn for collaboration, either during the writing process or when it gets to the rehearsal room?

What’s really interesting about work_from_home– and other livestreams that ask for audience interaction – is the way they work against that strangeness, putting you in the metaphorical room and keeping you there. Zoom holds you accountable as an audience member. You can’t wander off or send a text – and if you slurp your tea, everyone else will see you doing it. Much like going to work, the prospect feels a bit daunting at first, but I came away energised and buzzing with ideas.Graeber’s most perceptive question is ‘what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?’ Capitalism has made us value the wrong kinds of work. Work for financial gain has become the most visible and most societally valued kind of work. But we work in exchange for so many things, and we get so many things in exchange for much other than work. I wonder, sometimes, what would happen, if we framed the value of work in the terms of Ann Boyer’s question ‘but who made this world?’. If we collectively decided that we were exchanging our work for how much world we made by doing it? Preoccupied with the internal and external idiosyncrasies of the weather, this piece is slow, careful, quiet, rambling at times. As an audience member you are forced to slow down with it, and go where it's taking you. Read our full review here. Photo: Aidan Moseby Alongside its fast cars, dizzying theatrical devices and pounding beats, Common Wealth's Peaceophobia counters prejudice with stories of humour, passion, and belief. Read our full review here. Photo: Ian Hodgson Dykegeist @ Summerhall (★★★★)