Kerstin Anderson, Alexander Pobutsky, and Miles G. Jackson in Bull. Photo: Marc J. Franklin

If you’ve ever had a corporate job, the minute you walk into JACK, the conference room setting of Bull, a 2013 play by British playwright Mike Bartlett, now revived in a tensely and intensely intimate production by the Bridge Production Group and directed expertly by Max Hunter, will feel instantly recognizable and alarmingly real. Thomas Jenkeleit’s set design makes the small space even more intimate—to the point of claustrophobia—framing in a white box of an office conference room with the audience on two sides standing in for walls. It’s got fluorescent lights on its dropped ceiling, a broken vending machine, a poster overstuffed with motivational slogans, a wire-mesh cabinet of office supplies—but its tense energy comes from people waiting for the ax to fall. 

Times are hard, and the unnamed corporation for which our characters work is heading into layoffs of a third of the staff—which means on the three-person team that gathers in the conference room to wait for the big boss, Mr. Carter: two will stay and one will go.

It’s either Bull’s flaw or its genius that we never feel a moment of doubt about the outcome. Buff, good-looking team leader Tony (Alexander Pobutsky, a perfect Teflon-coated bro), in his high-end athleisure vest and his well-worn but expensive loafers, and poised, cutting Isobel (Kerstin Anderson, her polish a thin veil over her contempt), with her blond French twist and her leather work tote, were always going to make the cut. (Amanda Roberge’s costumes are rich with telling detail even in their simplicity.) Awkward, anxious Thomas (Miles G. Jackson, embodying twitchiness even when sitting perfectly still), in his not-quite fitting suit and his not-quite fitting demeanor—the one who puts coins into the vending machine because the Post-it reading “broken” has fallen off—was always going to fall short. And he’s the only one in the room who doesn’t know that from the beginning. (We in the audience might spend a little more time hoping for a twist, but it won’t come.)

Which means the whole thing is essentially an hourlong exercise in cruelty, with the three principals and director Max Hunter ramping up the malice incrementally. Isobel and Tony needle Thomas from the first moment: his hair is wrong; his suit is wrong; Tony “forgot” to tell him to bring “supporting paperwork” documenting his accomplishments. He’s not keeping up, or he’s not cool enough, or he’s too annoying, or he’s a creep who leers at Isobel—or he hasn’t done anything at all, and Isobel and Tony just see an easy target. However much they claim not to be allies, it’s clear there’s been a little bit of advance planning. Even when he attempts to stand up for himself and fight back, you can feel his barbs bouncing off their impervious shells–they’ve absolved themselves of even considering him. (Hunter and Bartlett have subtly Americanized the script and the class undertones to this contempt read slightly differently than I imagine they would to a British audience, but they remain present.)

It’s funny, at first, how easy it is to fluster Thomas, and how much Isobel and Tony enjoy messing with him. It’s a microcosm of all the ways in which our corporate jobs dehumanize us, make us seek out the tiniest bit of power and flaunt it. In their regular out-of-work lives, Isobel and Tony may be perfectly nice people (okay, probably not. Tony, per Isobel’s account, is consistently slimy with women, and as we see at the end, Isobel is perfectly willing to stoop to gratuitous physical violence and then drive the metaphorical knife deeper into Thomas’s back even after she’s conclusively won). But inside this room, they’re petty monsters. And when boss Mr. Carter (Paco Tolson) shows up to conduct the “assessment” that will finally determine their fate, it’s a foregone conclusion that Isobel and Tony will use their alliance of convenience to bring Thomas down even lower than he was before. Carter’s “tell-it-like-it-is” attitude to Thomas’s humiliation adds insult to injury.

And as Tony and Isobel get more casually, reflexively cruel, more indifferent to the humanity of the person they’re humiliating; as they ratchet up the prank level and just keep grinding Thomas into dust, it becomes more and more uncomfortable just being in this small room with them: Isobel relishes finding a way to punch down (a tragic backstory is sketched for her that might explain this, if true, but it turns into another weapon in her quiver, whether it’s true or not). Tony casually assumes his superiority in a way that requires only a modicum of his attention to keep executing. He lies as easily as he breathes and we can feel him toying with his prey like a big cat.

The frustrating thing about watching Bull—though perhaps also the way in which it’s truest to life—is that the only thing that changes for any of them is foretold from the beginning. Thomas loses his job and sinks farther into misery; Tony and Isobel keep doing what they’re doing; Carter never cared about any of them in the first place. “Winning” just means hanging on to the unsatisfying sliver you’ve got (and it can’t be that satisfying, judging from all the lies Tony tells about his life), but losing just means getting farther crushed. Thomas was set up to fail from the beginning—even the vending machine knows it. You can’t look away, but there’s no satisfaction in watching it happen–and even less satisfaction in realizing how relevant and accurate its portrait of the British corporate sector economy twelve years ago feels in the U.S. right now.