Brighton’s Hydrocracker company makes its London debut with this lively new play by Neil Fleming about management consultants. It’s a rich topic given that government spending alone on consultants shot up from £6m in 1980 to £1.8bn in 2009, and my only beef about Fleming’s business-driven play is that he needlessly inflates a fascinating subject by giving it Faustian overtones.

Fleming is at his best when he writes about the mechanics of external expertise. We see how Hugo, chief executive of a medical-scanner firm on the skids, is first entrapped by Nicola, the female bait of a top management consultant; when Nicola later gives a lecture on the importance of intimacy, homework and reliability, we realise how she has put those buzzwords into practice.

But it is her boss James, a wheelchair-bound Mephistopheles, who really puts the screws on Hugo and, in the course of a few days in France, turns him from a hapless jargon-spouter into an assertive bully ready to face his board.

At one point James tells the chief exec’s sceptical wife “you have come to do battle for the soul of Hugo”; the play suffers from such overheated exchanges and the elevation of James into a diabolical power addict. But Fleming offers some sharply funny satire on business waffle and is shrewd enough to suggest that consultants occasionally expose the gentlemanly amateurism of the commercial sector. Geoff Church’s production is also vigorously acted by a strong cast.

Pip Donaghy as the maniacal James, Helen Millar as his seductive sidekick, James Wilby as the nervy executive and Sian Webber as his strong-minded spouse put flesh on Fleming’s argument that we live in a credulous age in which management consultants are treated with a superstitious awe once reserved for alchemists and astrologers.

Source: The Guardian /  Michael Billington / 28 March 2011
Photo credit: Tristram Kenton