No Place to Go
“If you just say words,” writer and performer Ethan Lipton drawls sardonically into his mic, “meaning will follow.” The crooning everyman at the heart of this satirical cabaret, just one of the many who make up that precarious group on the brink of unemployment, is a fountain of corporate jargon. He spews words like “incorporated”, “transferable”, “adaptability”, each as bafflingly yet reassuringly vague as the next. With redundancy looming, the only tool he is left with is the slippery, opaque language of the boardroom – and he’s going to use it.
No Place to Go wryly appropriates this language for its own purpose, offering a sharp, witty, musical critique of the post-crash economic landscape. Just as desk lamps are cannily repurposed as lighting for this production (an exercise in “efficiency”, no doubt), the words deployed across corporate meeting rooms are put to a new use, their reframing exposing the ridiculous emptiness they always echoed with. The man doing the reframing is Lipton’s alter ego, a working artist and “permanent part time” information refiner who is being laid off as his office relocates. To Mars.
The spiralling anxiety, indecision and despair that follows this surreal news forms the meat of the show, which is delivered by Lipton and his brilliant self-styled orchestra of three through a mash-up of storytelling, stand-up and cabaret. Lipton mourns the comfortingly familiar mundanities of the workplace, stages the bitter break-up with his job that he had always expected to initiate, stands mired in soulful stasis as his impending unemployment rushes towards him. The infectiously toe-tapping music both harmonises and tussles with this narrative, from the upbeat rhythm of the purposeful working day to the grimly amusing irony of romantic melodies overlaying an allegory of detached corporate decision making.
Beneath the lively humour, detachment is endemic in the system that Lipton depicts. In a structure where we are all accountable to no one but the invisible shareholders, Lipton’s show traces the effects of a ruthless atomisation of labour, in which friendly workplace soccer games are replaced by faceless outsourcing and an insistence that “it’s not personal”. Even Lipton’s protagonist, despite bemoaning the loss of the camaraderie he used to share with his colleagues, is susceptible to this fatal lack of connection, becoming so absorbed by his own troubles that he is barely able to acknowledge the band members with whom he shares the stage. The only danger, as we are enjoyably caught up in Lipton’s genial – if occasionally barbed – storytelling, is that we too fall prey to the paralysis that we see playing out on stage.
While No Place to Go may not quite offer a call for the action its central figure so lacks, where it does land its punch is with the heartbreaking, depressingly familiar precariousness its narrative evokes. Lipton’s anguished search for an epiphany seems to be in vain, but it does yield one: the terrible fragility of our assumption that we will continue to have work. Everywhere, from the insubstantiality of Lipton’s trade in information to the minimal, makeshift set, this fragility is bitterly reaffirmed. “We’re falling and we’re just hoping for the best,” Lipton shrugs; words – unlike the bland corporate speak – that are all too resonant in the world today.
