Anna Madeley: Why You Should Come & See …

Contractions is really on the button of how the corporate world is working on us, how we interact with people in an office environment and how work bleeds into your private life and dictates how you live. It throws up this really intriguing idea about whether a corporation has the rights of an individual – even though it doesn’t have the emotional traits of a person. The play is also incredibly funny.

There are two characters – a manager and an employee – and the play covers 14 office meetings between them. I play Emma, the employee, and Julia Davis is the manager, who doesn’t have a name, she’s just ‘the manager’. At the beginning, Emma is fairly new to this company and she goes to her review thinking everything is okay, but the manager has issues with things Emma has done and you see how Emma responds to these. Emma is very normal, pretty confident, pretty ambitious and serious about her job. She works in sales in this multi-national organisation – though it’s never mentioned what she sells.

The production is being staged in a rehearsal room on the third floor of the Royal Court. That’s been funny. Normally you rehearse something and then you move into your performance space, but we’ve been in the space since day one, and the office set was slowly built around us. The audience come up through the Royal Court offices to get to us, so it really feeds into the atmosphere of this being a place of work.

As an actress, I’m not very familiar with working in offices myself. In theatre, everyone is so friendly and lovely, and work is all about creating a safe environment, embracing fear and accepting failure – failure’s how you discover things and you shouldn’t be afraid of it as an actor. But in some areas of the business world, you’ve got to be on it all the time, you can’t make a mistake, you’ve got to cover yourself.

We’ve all been feeding off people we know who have office jobs and asking them about dress codes, meeting etiquette and those things. The only office experience I’ve had was at a market research company, where I had to call people up for surveys, which was really boring. I do draw on memories of that office. I remember that carpet that’s in every nasty rental property, that kind of smell you get and those blank spaces that are very impersonal. I didn’t love working in an office, but it has been really useful to me as an actor in a research sense to have a flavour of what they can be like.

– Anna Madeley was talking to Terri Paddock

Contractions is written by Mike Bartlett and directed by Lyndsey Turner. It continues at the Royal Court until 14 June 2008.