In Simon Stokes’ tenure at its artistic helm, the Theatre Royal in Plymouth has accrued a sizeable reputation for presenting thoughtful and adventurous new work, both in its main house and particularly in the Drum studio. Glenn Waldron’s play comes to London as part of a repertory season of two recent Drum productions. (The other show, Mikhail Durnenkov’s The War Has Not Yet Started, has not yet... well, precisely.)

Structurally, Waldron’s play is a classic bait-and-switch. The first half of the 85-minute piece shows a team-building away day for a group of pharmaceutical salespeople. Pointless buzzphrase-chanting and activities usually involving balls (no comment) alternate with each member rehearsing a scripted sales pitch for a mediocre, inessential product; the pitch is of the “Let’s be honest” type of dishonesty first anatomised in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, and the four members deliver it with varying degrees of plausibility, seriousness and competence. It’s clear that soft-hearted, near-gibbering Helen is shortly for the chop.

What actually chops, however, is the chronology. Suddenly we jump forward several years, into a world ravaged by a multiply-resistant plague. Helen has now captured the smug, mendacious former team leader Niall in an attempt to obtain some of a rumoured wonder drug to save her son. Becci Gemmell’s Helen has not changed in temperament – her default soft approach is shown when, in a terrific touch of bizarre black comedy, she attempts to persuade her bound prisoner by means of a shoddy PowerPoint presentation – but the additional resources she has found within herself are demonstrated by the everyday torture implements she also produces. Simon Darwen’s Niall is now drugged but unyielding and quite possibly just as insincere as in the old days. (The other two members of the sales team are casually, shockingly dismissed in a photomontage of plague victims.)

Stokes’ direction works the psychological gear-change adroitly by not working it explicitly, but allowing the incongruities to emerge and confront us. Waldron’s play is a mordant indictment of big pharma’s bottom-line-centred approach to health crises, but overdoes things with a coda set further in the future in which the recorded voice of Bill Paterson announces a messianic-eugenic “solution”... patented, of course.

Written for the Financial Times.