Jobsworth at Pleasance Courtyard – Edinburgh Fringe review

Isley Lynn has had a fantastic run of form with plays including award-winner The Swell and Fringe favourite Skin A Cat, and she teams up here with cracking performer Libby Rodliffe to co-write Jobsworth, running at one of Edinburgh’s main hubs, the Pleasance Courtyard.

It proves to be a solid solo piece. The plot follows Bea (also played by Rodliffe), desperately trying to make ends meet by working three jobs simultaneously in a city packed full of apathy and ego. One moment she’s a PA, the next she’s a concierge, then she’s off to dogsit for a bougie friend.

Scarpering from location to location without breaking a sweat, she’s essentially trapped in a Kafka-esque, nightmarish version of Servant to Two Masters, except one master is having a shady affair and another is prone to putting up buildings that flout building regulations. There’s also an amusing aside about leashes for walking snakes, which is a deeply satisfying thing to imagine.

The central thesis of Lynn’s play is pertinent and, to some extent, melancholic: the ruthlessness of the gig economy, exacerbated by the intense apathy of older generations, has pitted late-stage millennials against one-another, having to cast aside common decency for the sake of simply staying afloat. The terrifying reality of colossal, near-insatiable amounts of debt is also laid out in painstaking detail.

But for all of Bea’s frantic, relentless grafting (super performance from a red-blazered Rodliffe, who also portrays all the other quirky figures on this canvas of capitalist chaos), the play feels oddly muted, pulling its punches when the claws are ready to come out.