Lara is a recent graduate, having completed her degree in Creative Writing. She wants to be a writer, which is why when we first encounter her, she is working as a waitress at a Tapas place.
Service Please is a one-woman monologue, diving into Lara’s first, somewhat brutal, encounter with the world of employment.
We follow Lara as she recalls her first day at the restaurant, called ‘Barcelona Bites’. It reeks of being an overly noisy chain restaurant, and the fact that we find out later that there’s a HR department seems to confirm this.
As we’re living in late stage capitalism, there’s no real training – other than in some ‘litigation avoidance’ topics such as ‘sexual harassment in the workplace’.
Lara also realises pretty quickly that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She survives the first month, and then it all starts to click.
Drastically understaffed, Lara is ‘promoted’ to a leadership role, where the stress and the long hours start to take their toll on her ability to write.
And then, one night, there’s an Incident. Lara waves it off – as young women always do: too scared to say anything for fear of not being believed; for fear that they’re over-reacting; for fear that they’ll be the ones to lose their jobs.
And so Lara says nothing, and carries on. The accounts of her days at work get worse and worse. Someone older, with more workplace experience would have told her to get out months earlier.
It’s already been made clear, by Lara herself, that her personal situation contains enough privilege that she could just walk away from this terrible position.
But Lara is anxious to impress. Anxious to show that she can cope with the world of work, and managing finances, and time, and a relationship.
It’s obvious that all of this is building to some sort of catastrophic confrontation, and indeed it is. One night, after a particularly awful shift, Lara gets talking to her colleague. That colleague does not have the position of privilege that Lara has, but she’s also been the victim of the same behaviour Lara has.
Lara decides that this is the final straw, and takes a stand, knowing that it could be the end for her, but realising that she can’t expect her colleague, who has much greater financial precarity, and no support network, to make a formal complaint.
This is a show about women supporting women, and how this should manifest itself. It’s about recognising that we shouldn’t ask those in worse circumstances than us to take a stand when we can afford to instead.
It’s about believing women when they say that a man has behaved in ways he shouldn’t. It’s about women trusting their own instincts.
Constance Peel, who portrays Lara, and has also written and directed the play, gives a confident performance. She captures Lara’s highs and lows in a realistic and truthful manner.
Peel engages well with the audience, who are effectively her confidants for the 50 minute running time.
A small note that there is some fairly frequent use of swear words, which, together with the subject matter makes this play unsuitable for children or less mature teenagers.
This is a vital piece of theatre, revealing the realities of working in unpleasant environments, and of the sacrifices young people make in a desperate bid to build a life for themselves. That the themes remain timely, and still urgent, should cause us to ask what we can do, and to take action.
Service Please continues at The Space @ Surgeon’s Hall, at 9:55am daily, until August 23
Featured Image Credit: Fringe Society