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Push-Up
Everyone wants to get to the executive suite. Everyone wants the Delhi job. Everyone wants sex, everyone wants love. So they push for it. Published alongside the U.K. premiere at the Royal Court, a sexy new play from an exciting new German writer.
- GenresPlays
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 20, 2023
The first of Schimmelpfennig's plays to be translated and performed in English (at the Royal Court in 2002, featuring David Tennant), it's an utterly brilliant, sardonic and very witty take-down of corporate politics. It's basically three duologues, in each of which two antagonists play cat and mouse games with each other, trying to vie for power, prestige and the all-important 'Delhi job'. Bookended with trenchant monologues by two blue-collar security staff employees at the same firm, it is an eye-opening look at just how crass and manipulative people can be in their quest for 'making it'.
Seems that the author has abandoned the theatre in recent years in favor of fiction, which is a shame. since he's one of the contemporary greats - but I am now going to have to make my way through his back catalogue of plays; he's just that good.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/...
Seems that the author has abandoned the theatre in recent years in favor of fiction, which is a shame. since he's one of the contemporary greats - but I am now going to have to make my way through his back catalogue of plays; he's just that good.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
https://www.britishtheatreguide.info/...
May 30, 2018
Una obra estupenda, en la que se reúnen cuatro historias diferentes en el marco de una empresa multinacional.
November 11, 2022
People who work in big office buildings for giant monolithic corporations--and I know this, because I worked in one for thirteen years--do plenty of productive stuff; but too much time is spent posturing, primping, and planning: figuring out how to tell the boss so-and-so or when to go over his head or when to play politics behind her back. It's a sexy, scary, lonely world, and it's perfectly captured in Roland Schimmelpfennig's sharp and entertaining play Push Up. In three connected vignettes, plus a neat prologue and epilogue, Schimmelpfennig reveals the machinations that seem to mean so much but ultimately amount to so little in the so-called "professional" lives of business people on the way up and down.
Each of the main scenes is an encounter between two sparring members of an unidentified but obviously large European enterprise. In the first segment, Angelica, a high-powered executive who is also the wife of the head of the company, is interviewing Sabine, a younger rising star in the firm, for a position at the Delhi office. In conversation that's barely civil and in monologues (delivered to us), the women expose their ambitions and their unhappinesses: they're alike, of course, and not satisfied with their lives. That Sabine is not going to get the job is a foregone conclusion, but the murky path toward resolution of this situation makes for compelling eavesdropping.
Even more intriguing is the rivalry/romance between Robert and Patricia in the next scene. They had a one-evening stand (in the boss's office, at the Christmas party last year); now they're supposed to work together on a new television commercial for whatever it is that this company sells. Again, cooperation seems impossible; what we have here, as someone once said, is a failure to communicate that's almost tragic in terms of the missed connections that it has brought about.
The final vignette is the strongest, introducing us to Hans and Frank, a boss and subordinate who are vying for the same position (that Delhi office job). Though an element of competition is certainly present, what's central here is the emptiness of the lives surrounding these allegedly meaningful careers. The older man spends hours every day on his exercise machine, bulking up and watching his diet (for whom?), while the other wiles away his nights on the Internet, downloading free porn and fantasizing about a Russian model named Natasha. Schimmelpfennig illuminates most sharply here the sad existences of his characters--the desperation and alienation shared by all six of these people who have seemingly surrendered some component of their humanity for the sake of "getting ahead."
And although this may not seem like radical new territory for exploration, Push Up manages to make it feel both fresh and pertinent by juxtaposing internal and external conversations in each scene. We get inside the heads and hearts of these folks, and see the truths that they cannot--or will not--acknowledge. Shrewdly, Schimmelpfennig frames this trio of dialogues with two monologues that point up, in stark contrast, another way to live--a way that lets some of the rest of the world into an office routine that, let's face it, can never be wholly nurturing or natural on its own. Heinrich and Maria, the two "blue collar" security personnel who deliver these two monologues, remind us that politics, power, and posturing are worthless without context.
Each of the main scenes is an encounter between two sparring members of an unidentified but obviously large European enterprise. In the first segment, Angelica, a high-powered executive who is also the wife of the head of the company, is interviewing Sabine, a younger rising star in the firm, for a position at the Delhi office. In conversation that's barely civil and in monologues (delivered to us), the women expose their ambitions and their unhappinesses: they're alike, of course, and not satisfied with their lives. That Sabine is not going to get the job is a foregone conclusion, but the murky path toward resolution of this situation makes for compelling eavesdropping.
Even more intriguing is the rivalry/romance between Robert and Patricia in the next scene. They had a one-evening stand (in the boss's office, at the Christmas party last year); now they're supposed to work together on a new television commercial for whatever it is that this company sells. Again, cooperation seems impossible; what we have here, as someone once said, is a failure to communicate that's almost tragic in terms of the missed connections that it has brought about.
The final vignette is the strongest, introducing us to Hans and Frank, a boss and subordinate who are vying for the same position (that Delhi office job). Though an element of competition is certainly present, what's central here is the emptiness of the lives surrounding these allegedly meaningful careers. The older man spends hours every day on his exercise machine, bulking up and watching his diet (for whom?), while the other wiles away his nights on the Internet, downloading free porn and fantasizing about a Russian model named Natasha. Schimmelpfennig illuminates most sharply here the sad existences of his characters--the desperation and alienation shared by all six of these people who have seemingly surrendered some component of their humanity for the sake of "getting ahead."
And although this may not seem like radical new territory for exploration, Push Up manages to make it feel both fresh and pertinent by juxtaposing internal and external conversations in each scene. We get inside the heads and hearts of these folks, and see the truths that they cannot--or will not--acknowledge. Shrewdly, Schimmelpfennig frames this trio of dialogues with two monologues that point up, in stark contrast, another way to live--a way that lets some of the rest of the world into an office routine that, let's face it, can never be wholly nurturing or natural on its own. Heinrich and Maria, the two "blue collar" security personnel who deliver these two monologues, remind us that politics, power, and posturing are worthless without context.
August 3, 2023
I will endeavour to write a short review that doesn't tell the whole story in order to pique interest in this exciting play rather than to dispel it.
I have been lucky enough to have seen a number of plays by Roland Schimmelfennig. Push Up is not one of them. But it hardly seems to matter thanks to this brilliant translation by Maja Zade.
Office politics and bastardry on the greasy pole, located somewhere near the slippery slope, in this case an opportunity to head an advertising firm's office in Delhi (really... Delhi?), are what's in store for the intrepid theatre-goer of the mind in this play from the turn of the century.
In Push Up, Schimmelpfennig's duologues sizzle and spit as characters converse without really listening to what the other says. We, on the other hand, hear everything and this device offers insight and ratchets the fly-on-the-wall tension to the limit. Still, in the end, who cares who gets the gig in Delhi? They can have it, maybe it's what these totally self-serving people deserve.
It's the journey that Schimmelfennig takes us on which is important. For me, the destination hardly seems to matter (which is the second time I have used that phrase...does noticing that make me as narcissistic as Schimmelpfennig's characters?).
Yet, to finish quickly, it does make for riveting theatre.
I have been lucky enough to have seen a number of plays by Roland Schimmelfennig. Push Up is not one of them. But it hardly seems to matter thanks to this brilliant translation by Maja Zade.
Office politics and bastardry on the greasy pole, located somewhere near the slippery slope, in this case an opportunity to head an advertising firm's office in Delhi (really... Delhi?), are what's in store for the intrepid theatre-goer of the mind in this play from the turn of the century.
In Push Up, Schimmelpfennig's duologues sizzle and spit as characters converse without really listening to what the other says. We, on the other hand, hear everything and this device offers insight and ratchets the fly-on-the-wall tension to the limit. Still, in the end, who cares who gets the gig in Delhi? They can have it, maybe it's what these totally self-serving people deserve.
It's the journey that Schimmelfennig takes us on which is important. For me, the destination hardly seems to matter (which is the second time I have used that phrase...does noticing that make me as narcissistic as Schimmelpfennig's characters?).
Yet, to finish quickly, it does make for riveting theatre.
November 9, 2019
Lovely play. Schimmelpfennig crawls into the mind of the characters. Men and women aren't always coming from different planets. To be read with chocolate, nuts and crisps.
April 19, 2026
3.5 rounded up
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews