Jordi Galceran’s play reminds me of a hybrid of Yasmina Reza’s Art and Mike Bartlett’s Bull (although Galceran’s work, written originally in Catalan, predates Bartlett’s by a decade or so). It shares with the latter a particularly savage corporate setting: here, four candidates for a senior post (or so it seems) find they are not to be subjected to the usual interview, but rather put through a series of psychological games/tests. Of course, innumerable workplace dramas show heartlessness and aggression as classic characteristics – even, in their way, virtues – of the business mentality, but in this case the relentlessness of Jonathan Cake’s smoothly spoken yet despicable Frank amounts to bullying. At various points he repeatedly berates the other three for being, respectively, boring, transgendered and, well, just not being him.

The Reza comparison comes with the piece’s polished, high-speed talkiness, given full rein in BT McNicholl’s assured production. The quartet debate whether or not to engage in each individual test and then debate as part of the tests themselves... one of them is simply a classic-format balloon debate. The (fictitious) selection method of the title tests various character aspects including credulity, leading to an early boom in paranoia; eventually, though, matters settle down into an arrangement which, whilst unlikely, is not altogether implausible.

And this is the second aspect of similarity to Art: we enjoy a succession of entertaining moments, but the more the play goes on (and it is only 90 minutes, without interval), the less it all seems to add up to. Are Cake, John Gordon Sinclair as the affable nebbish, Laura Pitt-Pulford as Melanie, who alternates between showing a threatening compassion and trying to outdo Frank in bastardy, and Greg McHugh as, er, the other one showing how such pressures de-evolve us to brutality, or how they bring out our core characters? We don’t know, and I’m afraid we don’t much care; in the final half-hour or so, each successive twist adds to the impressive intricacy but also suggests that any given viewpoint or perspective is unreliable and gratuitous.

Written for the Financial Times.