Multiple Bad Things’ intriguing vignettes do not quite add up to an idea

Multiple Bad Things

Back To Back Theatre
Singtel Waterfront Theatre
Aug 21, 8pm

If the dystopian workplace has a furniture showroom, it might well be the terrifyingly sparse set Australian theatre company Back To Back Theatre has assembled onstage.

At its centrepiece, workers labour futilely at an unkempt structure of jumbled beams while pregnant clouds loom above. It is flanked by a pink flamingo pool float – the quintessence of a company’s gaudy recreation room – and an isolating work desk with a computer screen that vomits brainrot.

These are allegorical scenes Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch would design were he commissioned to paint corporate hell.

Back To Back Theatre, which was awarded the 2024 Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Theatre, is known for tackling issues surrounding disability with an ensemble of neurodivergent and disabled theatre-makers.

Multiple Bad Things, a loose series of conversations in the workplace, tackles power dynamics at work and raises uncomfortable questions about office behaviour. It is part of the Esplanade’s annual Studios season, themed Precarious Bodies.

But the vignettes, of which there are intriguing flashes in this hour-long production, do not quite add up to a substantial idea.

Co-directed by Tamara Searle and Ingrid Voorendt, and devised with its actors, Multiple Bad Things suffers from a surfeit of absurdist dialogue and allegorical play that are often too elliptical or abstract for audiences to latch on to.

Even its workplace setting is only alluded to so thinly that it requires a few interpretive leaps for audience members to find their bearings in the show’s universe.

Some promising moments in the play come across as beginnings of ideas that require more fleshing out before they can deliver their provocations.

In one memorable scene, a slacking worker, Matt (Scott Price), who only doomscrolls, gets on the nerves of a more industrious co-worker, Faye (Bron Batten, the only non-disabled actor on stage), and their conflict eventually devolves into a weaponisation of diversity language and name-calling.

Faye, too, mocks another co-worker, Vic (Sarah Mainwaring), for spilling her tea and shapes up to be the villain of the workplace.

There is a comment here on the veneer of politeness and what happens when the mask is torn off, but the play’s vignettes soon move on and leave the meaty issue uninterrogated and in want of elaboration. The work is principled in its reticence, but perhaps places too much trust in the audience to fill in the gaps.

Simon Laherty, who plays a loner figure peculiarly named Deathweather, is separate from all the action and merely engages with his computer to play Solitaire or goes offstage to get a bag of snacks.

One might read his character as someone who is completely isolated and alienated from the workplace, but the play’s characterisation does not allow him to be more than a stand-in for that single impression.

A highly stylised visual language by set and costume designer Anna Cordingley gives much of the show its skeletal intrigue, but the bare threads of conversation that hang around it require more stitching together.

As it turns out, there are multiple things here – none of them bad, really – but one wishes they amounted to a stronger central idea.

Book It/Multiple Bad Things

Where: Singtel Waterfront Theatre at Esplanade, 8 Raffles Avenue
When: Aug 22, 3pm
Admission: $50 and $42 (concession)
Info: www.esplanade.com/whats-on/festivals-and-series/the-studios/2026/multiple-bad-things