Theatre Review: The Gronholm Method

Spanish writer Jordi Galceran’s teasing and sometimes tense satire about corporate culture was a hit in Barcelona. But transporting the setting to New York — the city that spawned such writers as Neil Simon, Stephen Adly Guirgis and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins to name but three — only reveals that, while Galceran has interesting things to say about the cut-throat world of big business, he needs to say them with much more wit.

The setting is a meeting room high up in a New York corporation’s skyscraper. Four candidates have arrived for the last stage in a selection process designed to reveal who is best suited for a coveted executive position. Frank (Jonathan Cake) is your alpha-male take-no-prisoners kind of exec; Melanie (Laura Pitt-Pulford) is a high-flying smooth operator, Rick (John Gordon Sinclair) is a gauche, middle-ranking manager hoping to give his career a much-needed boost and Carl (Greg McHugh) is flamboyant but perhaps more approachable than his fellow applicants.

It emerges, however, that the quartet are not going to be interviewed for the coveted vacancy, rather they will be tested in a way that would make the perfect reality TV show. The applicants are set tasks delivered in sealed envelopes proffered by a sinister drawer that opens from the office wall. The tasks expose and pressure the candidates, and from early on in the process they — and we — are told that one them is a fake applicant who works for the company’s HR department. But who?

It’s all very intriguing and the tricky plot keeps us in doubt as to the characters’ true identities. Yet although director B. T. McNicholl keeps the tension going for much of the play’s uninterrupted 90 minutes, he can only do so for as long as Galceron’s writing allows. It may be that Spain has a different sense of humour from that in London or New York.