"Set outside of the English capital, in the airless basement of a department store gone to seed, described by one bubblegum-blowing shop girl as "Dante's eighth circle", Cole lays the groundwork for HOTShop. The air is perfumed with sachet latte, microwaved spicy rice and spores of black mold. MIA's Paper Planes and Lana Del Rey's Video Games blare through the speakers. The light is artificial and shadowy."
"To the 20-something shop girls and much to their manager's chagrin, retail is a place where you trade time for money. The three of them trauma bond over their strungout bosses, dwindling bank balances, and hangovers while folding skinny jeans and fluffing swallow-print dresses. All of this boredom and unfulfilled ambition amounts to tension so palpable it's leaking from the pipes."
A debut play centers on twenty-something shop assistants working in an airless, decaying department store basement that smells of sachet latte, microwaved spicy rice and black mold. Pop songs like MIA's "Paper Planes" and Lana Del Rey's "Video Games" punctuate a world of artificial light and shadow. The characters trade time for money and trauma-bond over demanding bosses, dwindling bank balances and hangovers while folding jeans and fluffing dresses. Boredom and unfulfilled ambition create palpable tension. Claustrophobic realism mixes with witty dialogue, dramatic graphics and absurd stage directions to examine desire, coping and the limits of consumerist aspiration.
Read at AnOther
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]