The jobs market is in disarray, but it’s got nothing on this site-specific, interactive mess from Odd Comic.
Set in a real-life working employment agency, Would Be Nice Though... sets its audience up as candidates for an unspecified position. We’re given name badges based on nervous ticks and sent upstairs for the traditional awkward wait outside the interview room. One candidate starts talking about her urge to urinate when under stress. Another demonstrates her thought-process when faced with a killer question; pulling on the strings of her waistcoat as if inflating a lifeboat. It’s surreal and all too recognisable.
It’s also immediately obvious that they’re plants – and that’s fine. However, more problematic is their running the application as candidates, seemingly on a whim. You’d think some official might intervene, but no one else arrives. The whole set-up just gets blown apart. We’re asked to buy into and play along with a scenario that simply doesn’t adhere to its own logic.
In reality, this is site-specific sketch comedy and there’s very little reason for its more forceful attempts at interactivity. I’d happily watch Holly Bodmer and Dot Howard playing two manic applicants getting overly comfortable, prying into personal belongings and answering the phones. They find some great images in the mix: legs that sprout from desks, skirts that match the upholstery. Occasionally, they get gag-heavy (roll-play anyone?), but the final humiliating shuffle out of the office, in which Bodmer and Howard lie prostrate and inch their way down the stairs and off the premises is delicately surreal.
However, the string of kooky tasks that precede it are nothing but vacuous, out-of-place party games. Find the end of the sellotape? Fashion a sentence from words stuck to stationary equipment? Please.
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