Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – In a downsizing corporate environment, Mike Bartlett’s gladiatorial BULL still packs a visceral punch

• By drediman
• October 2, 2025
• No Comments

Currently at the cozy “storefront” theater venue JACK in Brooklyn, you’ll be able to find an intimate and in-your-face revival of Bull by Mike Bartlett, a playwright perhaps best known for concocting caustic works such as Cock and King Charles III. Penned more than a decade ago when the world was still reeling from the Great Recession, Bull tells the story of three corporate sales employees who vie for two positions in a downsizing company. Now that the country in the midst of another recession, the work remains relevant and therefore still packs a visceral punch. At just about an hour in length, Bull is a bitter pill of a play, wasting very little time before getting down and dirty.

Suffice to say, the work is relentless from the get go. If it seems little more than an excuse for Bartlett to theatrically depict a Darwinian scenario of survival of the fittest in the form of extreme instances of extreme workplace bullying, so be it. Bull‘s ruthless gladiatorial antics make themselves known almost immediately as two of the employees, Tony and Isobel, team up to viciously ensure that their positions within the company stay intact in the layoff environment. That means that over the course of the play, the far less aggressive and somewhat befuddled Thomas is subject to, directly and indirectly, constant goading and belittlement to the point of cracking — multiple times mind you, and to increasing severity. In a sense, the play’s element of surprise is that it doesn’t offer any real plot twist. With unabated persistence, it simply continues down the rabbit hole that it starts down, ending with a deadening thud with Thomas’s complete and utter evisceration.

Max Hunter brings welcome specificity to Bull, which unfolds with unforgiving intensity on Thomas Jenkeleit’s convincingly realistic conference room set design — complete with a broken vending machine, which plays a pivotal role in the play (no spoilers here). Indeed, the short play at times can feel awfully vague, which I suspect was intentional (the original staging, which I caught at 59E59 Theater’s Brits Off-Broadway series way back in 2013, leaned in on this aspect). The performances by the quartet of actors are often riveting. As Tony and Isobel, Alexander Pobutsky and Kerstin Anderson give calculated performances that teeter on a knife’s edge between mockery and outright aggression. And as Thomas, Miles G. Jackson plays flustered to a tee, in a turn that’s simultaneously empathetic and exasperating. Finally, the no nonsense Paco Tolson is ideally cast as their bulldozing boss.

RECOMMENDED

BULL
Off-Broadway, Play
JACK
1 hour (without an intermission)
Through October 12