Bored of the office? Tired of the same old routine? Feeling undervalued and taken advantage of by the boss? Then channel your inner fury and imagine those feelings festering for millennia, and you are close to the concept behind tonight’s play at the Burton Taylor Theatre.

In this new student comedy by Alice Wilson, this is the conceit the emotional path of the play is hung on. At times this construct feels a little laboured, and take it from me as a lifelong office worker, the Furies’ office bears little resemblance to my day-to-day bureaucratic experience. However, the play is carried by the emotional commitment of Ellen Hendry, Matilda Hadcock and Lara Deering playing the Furies. Megaera is all calm pragmatism and Alecto is full of spite and mad rage but the heart and soul of the play is Tisiphone’s emotional response to Orestes and their doomed love. This emotion provokes thoughts of the ideas around mortal versus immortal; revenge versus forgiveness; sister versus sister and all those other dire contradictions which affect daily life and which are frequently the basis of classical Greek theatre and many other subsequent dramatic forms.

The drama is not played for laughs, though the extremes and absurdities of the Furies' existence does provoke the occasional rye smile, but the central comedic relief comes from Alecto’s caricature of the bored office worker which often morphs into childish ennui. She is a sinister clown, firing elastic bands aimlessly into the audience to relieve her terminal boredom. Then, terrifyingly and amusingly, the character flips into vengeful child with violent, psychotic and disturbing tendencies.

As per usual for opening nights, the Burton Taylor had been transformed into a novel configuration. The bare, demi-promenade set did little to contribute to the drama but did leave lots of space for the Furies to emote, from Matilda Hadcock’s clowning and gurning to Lara Deering’s lovelorn Tisiphone, who yearns for change and freedom and tries to find a way out through her imagined love for Orestes – played as a lost soul and pale shadow of the Furies by Alex Grassam Rowe.

Following in the recent footsteps of such authors as Madeline Miller, this play seeks to re-imagine classical Greek mythology from a female perspective. These three Furies have become archetypes – antecedents of the maiden, mother and hag and progenitors of Shakespeare’s witches. A triumvirate operating outside the norms and challenging preconceived notions – now brought forward into a stifling twenty-first century bureaucracy. Thus, the play seeks to encompass ancient mythology, and through wit and wisdom, question and challenge some of the female stereotypes inherent from this mythology.

So, this is a play of seeming simplicity wrapped up in ancient mythology and challenging centuries of female stereotyping. All parcelled up in a bundle of tears and laughter – simple humour encompassing complex ideas, resulting in an entertaining theatrical hour, well worth a visit during this week’s run.