In this tricksy hybrid of comedy and thriller, four applicants for a senior role in sales at a vast American company attend a final evaluation. It’s a group test rather than a conventional interview, and the first of many revelations delivered by their unseen examiners is that one of them is a mole from the human resources department. The selection method alluded to in the title is a mix of the brutal and the puerile, calculated to be humiliatingly intrusive as it probes the candidates’ gift for oneupmanship.
The characters are recognisable types — even stereotypes, though all of them wear curiously inappropriate shoes. Laura Pitt-Pulford ’s Melanie is shrewd and efficient, while Carl (the pin-sharp Greg McHugh from Fresh Meat) has a clammy earnestness. John Gordon Sinclair is the creepily benign Rick, whose exaggerated lack of guile makes his offering a sweet to another interviewee seem borderline sociopathic. Yet the most memorable of the quartet, given a fiercely noxious boldness by Jonathan Cake, is Frank, a ruthless blowhard whose more repugnant vices include an eye-wateringly histrionic transphobia.
Catalan playwright Jordi Galceran has had huge success with this satirical portrait of heartless careerism, which since its premiere in 2003 has travelled to sixty countries and been made into a film. There’s one weak scene that involves the characters putting on headgear and doing silly impersonations, but otherwise BT McNicholl’s production zips along for 90 minutes, nodding to The Apprentice, Yasmina Reza’s comedies of middle-class manners and Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter.
The frequent switcheroos are enjoyable, and there are enough zingy jokes to deflect attention from the setup's implausibility. Yet vivid performances can’t mask the schematic nature of Galceran’s writing, which is clever without being especially perceptive.
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