Drama - Empowering the Cheese

Last weekend the town was plastered with posters for the theatrical event Empowering the Cheese, and we were approached by the company who are putting it on to let us know more about it. It is an offering from the company Cats3000, ‘a creative bridge between art and science in organisations and businesses’. ‘CATS’ stands for ‘Change and Transformation Strategies.’ This company have a theatrical arm ‘Rational Madness’, previously responsible for ‘Re-inventing the Cheese’, which was performed at the Brighton and Edinburgh festivals a couple of years back. They specialise in theatrical pieces based around the workplace, sometimes performed in unusual settings. They have acted out their sketch ‘The Photocopier’ around Xerox machines throughout the country. They also perform longer pieces, of which this is one, for corporate conferences, as well as mainstream audiences.

The show is based around the conversation between two employees of a failing factory at the funeral of the managing director, who has died due to the stress of the job. It incorporates a number of flashbacks. The idea is that the audience can identify with the exaggeratedly negative personality traits of the characters in the play, and this will help them to cope with similar behavioural patterns in their own workplace. The following evening the group are performing the same show as part of a business conference in the hotel. Sounds intriguing, decidedly odd, and not a little sinister, in a corporate-world-gets-all-touchy-feely sort of way.