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Brilliant Jerks
by Joseph Charlton
Southwark Playhouse
WHEN Joseph Charlton’s Brilliant Jerks was first performed at Vault Festival in 2018, Uber was less than a decade old, but its influence on the world was already enormous. Despite huge global resistance to its exploitative practices and a series of scandals, it is now an entrenched global brand. Katie-Ann McDonough’s revival feels like a warning we have failed to heed.
The plot melds three engrossing but uneven stories. Mia (Kiran Sonia Sawar) is a Glaswegian driver offering “bargain-bucket therapy” to stray passengers as they fall out of nightclubs or need a ferry to the airport. Sean (Sean Delaney) is an overly trusting coder, riding the wave of the company’s success and Tyler (Shubham Saraf) is the juvenile, status-obsessed CEO, hell-bent on taking over the world.
Between the three of them they also multi-role thirteen other characters in a whirlwind ninety minutes in which it’s not always easy to keep up, especially with costume changes kept to an absolute minimum.
Nevertheless, some brilliant performances do enough to ensure that we are kept in the loop from wild nights in Vegas to business conferences in Dubai and back to the back streets of Glasgow, where Mia’s encounter with her estranged son plunges her into old depths. Charlton also depicts a company in which sexual discrimination and violence are in-built into the model at every level.
Saraf is particularly captivating in both of his roles, combining a smarmy slickness with a cold heart as Tyler and playing the manipulator with ease as coding manager Craig. Sawar is equally convincing as the vulnerable, self-reflective Mia and glides through her many roles, switching convincingly between accents at the snap of a lighting change.
Charlton’s wild ride hits the buffers in surprisingly gentle fashion and all three main characters eventually seem to find themselves almost back at square one. With the show contorting into a BBC series later this year, featuring all three cast members, let’s hope those subplots find a more cohesive end on the box.
Runs until March 25.
Box Office: 020 7407 0234, southwarkplayhouse.co.uk
