Against the mixture of fantasy and farce served up by the current election campaign, Wild Bees offers a bracingly realistic appraisal of the watershed years when Rogernomics ushered in a brave new world of asset sales and employment contracts.
The play chronicles the triumph of neo-liberal economics by dissecting a
last-ditch union battle to hold on to old-style collective bargaining in the face of a ruthless drive towards individual contracts.
Although the story arc has the grim inexorability of a Greek tragedy, the drama has an unmistakable ring of truth that comes from writing born out of personal experience.
Playwright Phil Ormsby draws on his years as a union delegate in the telecommunications industry to produce instantly recognisable characters and the interminable rounds of phony negotiations are enlivened by some brilliantly witty dialogue - especially when an old-style shop-floor delegate played by Kevin Keys struggles with the intricacies of feminist semantics.
The predominant tone is documentary realism but when the trade-unionists become infected with the corporate culture they are fighting against, the drama takes on the circularity of Kafkaesque nightmare.
