3 weeks ago
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There’s no better way to unwind after a crappy day in the office than watching someone else have an even crappier day at the office. From Severance to Parks and Recreation to – obviously – The Office, we can’t get enough of hapless pen-pushers enduring team-building nightmares, emotionally stunted bosses and byzantine edicts from upper management.
“It’s kind of crazy,” says playwright Jean Tong. “Why are we going to the office and then going home and watching shows about being in the office? There’s something so strange and so totalising about work, and how we spend so many hours of our lives there.”
It’s not just the tube offering this relief: Tong’s satire of office life, Do Not Pass Go, has proven a surprise early hit of Melbourne Theatre Company’s 2026 season. At the time of writing, much of the six-week season has already sold out, and tickets to remaining sessions are thin on the ground. No doubt many in the audience will have come straight from the office themselves.
Perhaps these fictional workspaces give us a way to explore our own ambivalent relationship to the office. For Tong, there’s a fascination to the way office culture creates a kind of bubble. “You go into the office, you spend five minutes talking about how bad the world outside is, and then you jump on a Teams meeting. It’s completely bonkers to me. I find it very strange and we all just sort of accept that as the default.”
There’s also an absurdity to the disconnect between our own lives and the tasks we’re expected to carry out. For most of humanity’s history, our work was literally life-sustaining. “People existed in relation to the outside world, the environment, your crops were the things that you had a relationship to. You grew it, and then you could eat it. I can’t eat a spreadsheet.”
Tong says a similar impetus might motivate the prevalence of post-apocalyptic fictions right now, in which the modern world has been obliterated and characters are forced to rebuild communities from the ground up. “In all of those stories, no one’s on a laptop doing office emails. Everyone’s farming or making clothes, cooking. The actual things that a community revolves around are not the things that have come to dominate modern life, which is largely corporate culture, office work, this grind.”
If you’ve spent any amount of time as a cubicle jockey, hot-desker or corner-office-coveter, Do Not Pass Go is packed with minute details that will hit home. From the Kafkaesque challenges of intranet log-ins to the elaborate rituals of colleagues on a break, it’s a keenly observed portrait that goes well beyond the stereotypes of white-collar life. It revolves around the developing relationship between a new recruit – who brings an appropriate curiosity and suspicion towards their new role – and a rustier older colleague who would prefer the boat remains unrocked. Over time the power dynamics between the two are repeatedly upended, but their attitudes towards their work also undergo significant shifts.
The play began as more of an ensemble piece, written for an undefined number of cast members. “There was a massive collection of scenes,” says Tong. “Some of them were two-hander conversations, some of them were four. I didn’t actually start off with the idea of these two specific characters. I just wrote a bunch of conversations.”
Eventually Tong had around 50 such scenes, each inspired by the shared experiences of modern work life. “A lot of them were things that I was either reading about in the media, thinking about, or talking to my friends and my community about. I wanted to keep drilling into these conversations, because they were so repetitive and felt so common but we could never get to the heart of the conflicts in those conversations.”
This vast amount of material then underwent a lengthy process of distillation. As Tong edited and refined each scene, the real points of tension and difference underlying even the most innocent office flare-up would reveal itself, and these began to resolve themselves into the two-hander that comprises the play today.
This practice of refinement gives Do Not Pass Go an uncanny sense of what it’s like to work in a real office. So little happens, but so very much is going on. “I went, ‘What is the most minimal amount of literal plot that I can get away with?’” says Tong. “Because I think that’s how we experience [office life]. As we move through that world, I’m only getting the details of your life that you’re telling me.
“I see you once a day, we get five minutes of chat, and in those moments I get a little bit of information about your partner, a little bit of information about your family, a little bit of this and that.”
Just as we connect those dots to build a larger – though not necessarily accurate – understanding of our colleagues’ lives outside work, so too does the play give us the means to piece together the world in which it takes place. There’s much that’s eerily familiar, but we can never be sure whether we’re projecting our own interpretation onto events that are only mentioned in passing.
Audiences might also get a glimpse into the work that goes on at the MTC itself. Tong began writing it during a residency with the company, and took up the offer of spending some of the time working at its Southbank office. It had been a while since the 30-year-old had worked in such a space.
“Having a desk at MTC was a little bit of a culture shock,” they say. “And it’s not even a super corporate-y place. It is very creative. But it was strange because we’d be having these really deep conversations and then it’d be like, ‘Well, we better talk about the AGM’. Everyone had very specific tasks that they had to get through. They had very real to-do lists.”
But coming into the office was useful, Tong jokes, “because sometimes I’d feel pressured to work. Everyone else had work, and I couldn’t just be on my computer scrolling terrible memes while everyone around me was hustling. Sometimes that pressure was good.”
A real desk in a bustling office might have afforded Tong details to observe and include, but ultimately their play proves an intimate affair. It begins as satire but a real affection for the two people at its core elevates it to someplace else.
“The thing that I was more interested in is that despite all of this hopelessness, despite all of this pressure and work horror, that the only thing that we ultimately have is each other. Not a particularly bright or new idea, but I do think that in an era of algorithms and being at the whim of so many outside forces, the only thing we can rely on is that the person next to you is going to step up for you.”
Do Not Pass Go is at Southbank Theatre, February 14 to March 28.
