The story of one app told from the perspective of three people, Brilliant Jerks offers an insight into the humanity behind the tech boom. The play tells the story of three people connected to a fictionalised version of Uber.
Mia is a driver. She started driving as a stopgap job as part of her attempt to clean up her life after dealing with drug addiction and having to give her baby up for adoption. She is still driving for a living a decade later. Sean is a programmer, who gets caught up in the dog-eat-dog aggression of working at a cutting edge tech company. Tyler is the tech bro co-founder of the app, whose hedonistic approach to the Silicon Valley culture throws his marriage into chaos and draws controversy to the company.
All three of their stories have the app at their core, but the stories are ultimately human. If they didn’t happen with this app, they could have been transposed to another setting easily enough. Before the birth of the gig economy, Mia could have been a recovering addict doing shift work in a cafe and the key beats of her life would have been broadly the same. Sean could have experienced homophobia and the slap of his colleagues’ ambitions in any other big business. Tyler could have been the ideas guy behind any other large exploitative corporation.
The relationship each character has to the app modernises their stories. It shines some light on the particular nuances of the tech boom.
Mia, for instance, wallows in the isolation of the app until she has reached the peak of her personal story. It’s only after she has processed her lingering trauma around her addiction and her estranged son that she is able to engage with the issues she faces specifically because she exists within the gig economy.
This is a really interesting approach to the plot, but one that I think is incredibly effective in exploring how easily the biggest issues can be overlooked by our personal problems.
Throughout the entire play, the insecurity in Mia’s job is evident. Other drivers try to get her attention to talk about it, but she brushes them aside. She is leered at and commented on and messaged by men who show no understanding of boundaries She has to deal with members of the public who are drunk or high in her car – who are difficult enough to be around, even when you’re not recovering from your own addiction.
These issues are well documented in the news. Debates rage around how to make the gig economy fairer for workers, and safer for people who are already in marginalised communities.
But Mia’s focus is on her addiction and her son, and understandably so. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to fight for the change they need. Mia doesn’t.
Sean and Tyler are presented with similar focus. Sean’s workplace has obvious power imbalances that Sean benefits from when the manager is on his side, and suffers from when his opinions shift. At times, Sean is pressured into becoming the reluctant messenger between management and the under-represented groups in the office.
It’s easy to empathise with the discomfort in that situation when seen how he got there. But it doesn’t make it any better that he goes along with the status quo despite his friends’ evident distress.
Tyler’s story is perhaps the least relatable. He lives a life of luxury, building an empire and using company money to travel the world. Although he is committed to his wife, his downfall comes about due to his involvement in a culture that promotes substance abuse and womanising. He promotes the employees that ‘hustle’, even when their behaviour reflects so poorly on the company that it starts making headlines.
All three characters are incredibly well written and performed. It’s easy to be absorbed into their story, to lose sight of the bigger picture because you’re so caught up in the minutiae of their lives. (This is particularly true of the moments when Mia is driven to real tears by her experiences.)
Each delivers their story through a monologue to the audience, with scenes jumping between the three narratives. Even here, the nuances in their character are clear. Mia and Sean each sound like they’re confiding in friends, although just from their delivery you get the impression that their social groups are distinctly different. Tyler, on the other hand, speaks like he’s delivering a TED, all cockiness and confidence, even when he’s been disciplined by the board that he appointed.
These monologues slide easily into scenes for some moments better shown than told. There are only three actors in the whole production. Each one plays a different lead, with the other two slipping into different background roles where required. All of them are required to jump between multiple accents. It’s very impressive how they use body language and slight changes in their outfits to create an entirely different persona at a glance. A sweater tied around the shoulders tells a very different tale to one worn normally.
Brilliant Jerks doesn’t seem to offer a moral standing about the gig economy or the tech boom. It simply presents these three stories and leaves it up to you to decide how you feel – if you feel anything – about the impact these businesses have on the world. The app has had positive and negative impacts on each of them over the course of the show. Whether they came out the other end with a net positive or negative is left somewhat ambiguous.
It doesn’t offer a sense of closure about it either. The situation for each character is different, but not the satisfying ending that has every loose end wrapped up that you might hope for.
By the end, Mia is in more control of her situation, has a better connection with her peers, but she is still a struggling gig worker. Sean has seen the dark underbelly of his dream job and has settled for something smaller scale, boring but reliable. Tyler, privileged from the beginning, might have learned something, but it’s not entirely clear. He still has his cockiness and confidence and is making bank delivering speeches to other tech bros despite being controversially ousted from his role.
All of them have learned from their experiences and grown. They’ve all reached the next stage of their life apart from the app. But not all second chances are equal. Clearly.
It’s almost depressingly realistic. After everything that has happened, things only ever change so much. It’s very lifelike. It leaves you with a lot more to think about than if it had wrapped each story up with a neat happy ending, but in a way that feels like motivation to come up with a solution Brilliant Jerks doesn’t yet have.
Brilliant Jerks is running at the Southwark Playhouse in London until 25th March.
You can keep up with the production and other projects the team are working on by following them on Twitter.
