However, an hour-long, multi-media production that puts a game show spin on the lives of a nurse, a fast-food worker and a carer working on zero-hours contracts is making London audiences laugh as they cry at twice-nightly performances.

Produced and performed by Sweet Beef Theatre, I Hate It Here is being staged through Saturday night at the Pleasance Theatre in North London, and is shortly going on tour. It was created with support from Arts Council England and Camden People’s Theatre. 

Using interactive theatre techniques, the action takes audiences through the frustrations of trying to find child care at the last minute when an assignment comes through and distressing sudden reassignments for carer and care recipient alike when shifts are changed.  

“It’s become more and more relevant as time has gone on because more and more people are on these contracts,” director Jess Haygarth told Recruiter. 

“The reason I wanted to make it originally was about the feeling of instability… and it puts you in a state of almost constant hyper-awareness because you just don’t know [when work will come], and it makes it really hard to plan your life outside work,” Haygarth said. “You can’t really relax because you could get called. From the beginning, it was about how do we make the audience feel instability because that feeling is often more potent and good at demonstrating a point then about getting lots of facts and statistics.”

Comedic elements, such as a nurse character’s fandom of TV presenter Anne Robinson, were important, Haygarth said. “There can be a tendency for thinking, ‘This is a really bleak thing.’ We wanted to make sure the characters were still finding joy and we saw that they had dreams, and that intelligent people are finding their own ways to deal with it.”

The show helps bond the audience to the themes from the start, with zero-hours contracts left by each seat for attendees to sign, bingo cards, making the jobs available seem like prizes with seat numbers being called out and the audience member holding the number summoned down to the stage to change into work gear. A welcoming and overwhelmingly friendly ‘host’ becomes a sinister figure who lures unsuspecting ‘workers’ into the world of zero hours work. A digital clock on the wall counts down the minutes of an hour, punctuated by flashing lights and blasts of music.

Launched as her final project in earning her master’s degree in directing at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), I Hate It Here will travel to Basingstoke, Edinburgh, Leeds and Manchester for more performances.

“We want to tell these stories in a really human way and also in a bit of an experimental way,” Haygarth said. “It’s about hard-hitting themes but we want to get them across in a way that’s very fun and it’s supposed to be an engaging, interactive way of looking at an issue which is quite bleak.”

I Hate It Here runs at the Pleasance in London through 11 March at 7pm and 8.45pm, the Proteus Theatre on 16 March at 7.30pm, Summerhall from 21-22 March at 7pm, Left Bank Leeds at 7.30pm and Niamos Manchester on 26 March at 7.30pm.

Picture credit: Alex Brenner, I Hate it Here, director, Jess Haygarth