In her classic work of speculative fiction ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), Ursula Le Guin forces us to ask what – or who – we are prepared to sacrifice in order to build our utopias. Le Guin describes Omelas as a place of great beauty and happiness. A place that is joyous and ordered, that needs no kings. The people of Omelas are ‘mature, intelligent, passionate’, and there is no grief or misery in their lives. Crucially, Le Guin invites her readers to contribute to the imagining of this utopia, thereby implicating us in the substantial cost of building and maintaining it. As the story reveals, the bliss of Omelas is founded on the suffering of a starved and neglected child locked in a ‘foul-smelling’ underground closet. The child begs and screams, ‘Please let me out. I will be good!’

American playwright Max Wolf Friedlich introduces a comparable ethical dilemma in Job. Jane (Jessica Clarke) is on enforced leave from her position in ‘User Care’ with a San Francisco tech behemoth. Footage of her standing on a desk and screaming has gone viral, and she needs clearance from a company-appointed therapist, Loyd (Darren Gilshenan), before she is allowed to return to work. Jane is desperate to be given the okay, but Loyd, who has just managed to persuade Jane to put away the gun she has been holding to his head, is more than a little reluctant.

Prefixed by different scenarios that might (or might not) signal the dangerous dynamic between them, Jane and Loyd soon settle into an almost conventional therapist-patient dialogue – tell me about your work, tell me about your parents, tell me about your childhood. But Jane also wants to know a little about Loyd, who seems disposed (given she has a gun in her handbag) to oblige her with answers: he is a graduate of Berkeley, he has a twelve-year-old son, he is separated from his wife.

Their interchange reveals not only the gaps between them, but the tensions between the pre- and post-internet age that San Francisco embodies. Jane tags Loyd as a dinosaur of the hippy generation, responsible for the world that her generation is busily resisting. She is passionate about tech. She loves her phone. For her, apps like Facetune are empowering. They give her generation an opportunity to take ‘our own faces back’ – to resist the insecurities that Loyd’s generation has saddled them with. As far as Loyd is concerned, the two generations may not be all that different: ‘perhaps we’ve traded psychedelics for a slow drip of dopamine that comes from these devices in our pockets’.

When Jane eventually describes what her job entails, Loyd seems to have found the crux of her problem. Or has he? It was the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing – famous for his book The Divided Self (1960) – who declared that madness is a sane response to an insane world. When we learn that ‘User Care’ is corporate speak for content moderation, and that Jane spends her working life scouring internet sites for the extreme violence, vicious pornography, and dangerously deranged views that advertisers really don’t want their products accidentally associated with, then standing on a desk and screaming seems like a perfectly rational response. Until Jane explains why she is desperate to keep her job. The internet, she tells Loyd, is the world we live in, and she’s found meaning from being the first line of defense against ‘the worst things in the world’.

The exchanges between Clarke’s Jane and Gilshenan’s Loyd are riveting: there is palpable tension as they duck and weave around each other’s questions, in turn attacking and retreating. Clarke plays Jane at fever pitch but still manages to imbue Jane's motivation with the necessary ambiguity. Is she a martyr? Deranged? Or perhaps a little of both? As Loyd, Gilshenan astutely balances comedy, pathos, and near-tragedy, neatly negotiating the slight bump in Friedlich’s otherwise smooth plotting, when Jane’s accusations against Loyd shift from a critique of his generation to something dangerously personal.

Director Nadia Tass conjures an arena from Red Stitch’s compact stage: Jane pacing its perimeter like a caged animal, Loyd the wary prey she is stalking. If the set design (Jacob Battista) doesn’t quite evoke the hippy pad that Jane describes, it nevertheless affords the production a darkness and heaviness – Loyd’s windowless office, its walls draped in black velvet – that foreshadows the version of hell within which, we learn, Jane works and that seems to be penetrating her day-to-day reality.

When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee first developed the internet, his vision was that the internet would ‘serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.’ There is no doubt that the internet has allowed humanity to create things that only decades ago it might not have imagined, but this has been both for better and for worse. What Job emphasises is the way in which the internet has divided us, as societies and as individuals; the way it has reduced us to two dimensions. Winners or losers. Right or wrong. Good or evil. As we see in the friction between Loyd and Jane, there is little common ground, no in-between, no right and wrong. Whether we will ever again be able to discern the shades of grey in the world is the question Friedlich poses in this play. The play’s strength derives from its refusal to placate us with easy answers.

Jane insists that her job gives her purpose; it compels her to take concrete action against something she might otherwise idly swipe by: ‘I’d scroll past the body of a Black person murdered by the police and all I would do is share that person’s name on Twitter’. Job not only asks us to gauge the cost of this on the individuals who have the task of crawling through the sewers on our behalf (as Loyd notes, the prerequisite for Jane’s job is a ‘willingness to be tortured’), it also makes us complicit in Jane’s torture.

This is where Job intersects with Le Guin’s exploration of utopia. While everyone would agree that the internet is far from being the utopia that Berners-Lee might have imagined, it is nevertheless a world we have created and that most of us want to be a part of; a world we want kept sufficiently clean and unpolluted to justify our presence within it. While the standard of what we term clean and unpolluted might be inexorably slipping, we nevertheless are dependent on a sacrificial child – in this scenario, Jane – whose job it is to keep our daily social media feeds happily turning over. And, as Job suggests, we are equally dependent on those who, like Loyd, are left to tend to – to quote Le Guin – the child’s ‘abominable misery’.

Le Guin’s story makes us ask what we would do if we were confronted with the truth that, to sustain the world we venerate, someone must be made to live constantly in the dark. Do we accept the suffering upon which our happiness is built, or do we walk away? This notable production of Friedlich’s Job demands we ask ourselves the same question.

Job (Red Stitch Actors’ Theatre) continues until 12 October 2025. Performance attended: September 17.