Amendments is a two character play about Kenneth, a put upon Senior HR Rep, who must have an awkward conversation with John, an employee who has engaged in some inappropriate conduct toward a fellow employee. Allegedly. Middleweight Theatre are trying to start a debate about political correctness and how our actions can be perceived by those around us.

The tagline - “A play on words” - promises some clever puns and some interesting takes on the way language evolves. It is unfortunate that it is the writing that lets this production down so egregiously.

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve felt put upon, only to relive the conversation several days later - probably in the shower - and fantasized about the perfect response? If you have, then you will be well prepared for what’s on offer here. Characters set themselves up for verbal sucker punches left, right, and centre and are often left with no recourse but to let the point stand, leading to a stilted discussion that lurches from set piece to set piece. Best case scenario, this would be clumsy writing if it was done with an even hand.

It is not done with an even hand.

For a large portion of the 75 minutes, we see Kenneth as nothing more than a finicky, miserable caricature of an HR representative who feels more at home in a cartoon than a biting satire. The mere use of an ‘exotic’ or complex word, such as ‘farrago', or a metaphor of any kind, sends him into a tizzy, drinking water straight from the jug (a gag repeated multiple times). When the going gets tough, he puffs on his inhaler. When he’s offended, bizarrely, he claims his eczema flares up. Or his IBS. He seems permanently fearful, a slave to arbitrary and illogical rules.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the stage - literally, for the most part, with the characters rarely feeling the need to fully explore the space - John is depicted as a calmly skeptical everyman hero. He likes beer. He likes bowling. Kenneth calls him a ‘empathetic manager’ despite this mishap. He has young children at home. He likes having a laugh.

And yet. He thinks homophobic jokes are a key part of corporate team building. He believes men will stop hiring women if they can’t call them ‘dear’ or buy them chocolates for a job well done. He posits that women sometimes allege false sexual harassment claims to further their careers.

The plot is nonexistent, the characters simply circle around the same debate and tired gags ad nauseum. Unfortunately, and randomly the one thing the two men can agree on is that Carry On Up The Khyber is a great movie, Bernard Breslaw’s prominent use of brown-face not even worth a comment.

Throughout the play there’s a lack of research that stymies any potential for genuine debate. To take one particularly bad example that is emblematic of this, Kenneth suggests that the term “Hello Ladies and Gentlemen” should be phased out in favour of a different term in order to be more inclusive. The explanation behind this then has John comparing non-binary people to aliens, and Kenneth’s explanation unintentionally confuses being non-binary with being intersex. Which should matter, if we’re to believe this play genuinely wants to debate the topic it’s raised, not just mock a group of people it doesn’t care to understand.

There are some further snidely transphobic undertones: Keneth claims that they should refer to staff as ‘Men and people who can give birth’ and that John should avoid using his colleague’s name, Angela, because it is feminine and ‘We want to make sure you see her as a person, not just a woman’. The latter comment here is inherently ridiculous - no one is saying this in reality - and one of the many strawmen Kenneth presents for John to fight.

Elsewhere other arguments seem oddly cherry-picked: a university student suing his school for inadequate education and ending up a millionaire is used as a smoking gun of organisations being in fear of ligatory students or workers.

In reality, while this has happened in the past, it is not a common or easy get-rich-quick-scheme. The same goes for John’s casually tossed out comment that his colleague may be lying about sexual harassment to get ahead because ‘women do that, don’t they?’ - which is presented as if it’s a regular occurrence.

The play also mystifyingly paints Kenneth as desperate to get workers off Teams and back into the office and John blames a more PC work culture as the thing keeping them away. In reality, companies that care about employee wellbeing and equality tend to offer more flexible, hybrid and remote working options.

I went to see this production with my partner, himself a corporate manager in his thirties, and presumably, part of the target audience. He pointed out that the attempts to mock corporate business-speak also felt oddly dated. For example, ‘Thoughtshower’, though relevant in the late 2000s, has since been replaced with ‘Ideate’. ‘De-risk’ - mocked in the production for not being a word - is used in the same way that people use ‘de-bone’ - it’s much easier to say “We’ll derisk it,” than it is to say “We’re going to perform some suite of general actions that lower the overall risk of this endeavour.”

John opines that when he was growing up, the challenges he faced made him who he was today, unlike these weak ‘snowflakes leaving university’ (the play is littered with conservative buzzwords). It’s unclear what challenges John - a straight, white, middle class man - faced in the 80s and 90s that were distinctly tougher than what’s facing today’s youth.

References to Microsoft Teams, and COVID place us firmly in the now, but at one point a character claims there are “three billion women” on this planet. In the early 2000s, when it feels like this was written, this would be accurate, but that number is no longer correct. Additionally, John, a man said to be in his forties in 2023, spends a significant amount of the play yearning for the heady days of the corporate culture of the 80s and 90s. Even if we’re generous, this is a man who would have been in his teens during that decade, and only just entering the workforce as the nineties began.

One notable, surprisingly cogent and moving monologue toward the end reveals Kenneth to be more switched on than we’ve been led to believe throughout the entire play. While wildly and unsatisfyingly out of character, this would have been a fantastic time to end the performance, but sadly the play limped on a little longer and - slowly but surely - regressed the character again, to the extent of fully undermining that moment.

Throughout the play, Kenneth is portrayed as the arbiter of what can and cannot be said. The playwright goes to great pains to have John fight back against this, claiming the fear of being thought of as discriminatory is oppressive. In this way, we’re being asked to believe these two things are equal; being the victim of bigotry, and the risk of being considered to be a bigot.

Let’s be honest here: These things are not equivalent. Those who want a more equitable workplace are not a malevolent, all-powerful mass seeking to wrest power from the poor, straight cis white man.

Whenever people decry that political correctness has gone mad, especially in relation to the increasing visibility of trans people, to this reviewer it can give off the impression of myopia. They genuinely believe they are the first ones to have this crisis of relevance and power.

As if their fathers mocking the AIDS crisis, their grandfathers railing against the end of racial segregation or their great-grandfathers battling the suffragettes were not all men experiencing the same curdling fear and imaginary threat imposed by the unknown. Can they not see themselves joining this long, regrettable line?

The play is not provocative, nor is it thought-provoking. It is designed for two groups of people, those who want to be comforted in their view that left-leaning politics are silly, and those who have not thought particularly hard about the issues discussed and have no desire to start now.

It lacks the courage of its convictions and the intelligence of being well-researched. It’s humour is lazy and repetitive. It sets up its opposition as pathetic, histrionic and fickle, while giving the character with its favoured point of view composure, dignity and all the best lines. In doing so, it’s too cowardly to let the audience come to their own conclusions - it must guide their hand.

At one point in the play John wagers that perhaps the real problem these days is that no one is willing to hear any criticism. You cannot simply tell someone that their work is bad.

With that in mind, I won’t be apologising to the company for any offense caused, lest I offend them even further.