When the audience is boss

Daniel Nelson

World Factory

Image by Young Vic

The purpose is to give the audience – sitting at 16 tables in groups of five – an idea of the problems and possibilities of running a Chinese clothing factory.

Four giant screens show Chinese streets and workplaces, and four actors hurl rapid-fire quotes from workers and politicians: work, capitalism, mass production, squeezed margins, quality, profits, the cost of a buttonhole, livelihoods, the decline of British manufacturing, the rise of Chinese industry, tight deadlines, throwaway clothes.

Suddenly the table lights click on and each group is given a box containing a wad of banknote and cards carrying details of your 24 workers. Four actors deal out more cards, each with a factory manager’s dilemma and two possible choices which you highlight with a scanner.  The race is on.

The cards keep coming – do you stick to piecework or go for quality? Do you work with the official state trade union or an illegal independent group? Do you accept a bribe (“Money is power”)? Do you provide a minibus to take staff home for the new year holiday or give staff a cash handout?

Occasionally each team gets a sample shirt or high-viz jacket or other article of clothing to check and stack on the rack. The money pile starts to shrink or rise. Cards keep arriving and decisions discussed.

An hour passes and it’s time for a reckoning. Which group has most money? Most finished garments? What’s the environmental cost in terms of fabric and water and oil consumed?

Then, a final choice. Which of four future options do you select for your factory? Cue more rapid discussion around the table.

The discussions are the key. The livelier the chat the more fun you have. Sometimes I found it hard to focus on or even hear the details of a card being read out and my interest waned. At other moments I thought, Just pick an answer – what does it matter? At the end the cumulative numbers seemed – well, just big numbers. There’s a formula for working them out but it wouldn’t have mattered if they were arbitrarily made up and flashed onto the screens. Then again, even though you know the colossal amount of resources that go to make up one garment, it’ s always a shock to be reminded of our greed and wastefulness  – in, for example, giving or buying a garment and wearing it only once or twice before tossing it aside and launching its journey to landfill or Lesotho, or that the 1,000 kilogrammes of cotton our group used required 10 million litres of water.

Yes, you get a glimmering of the ethical and financial dilemmas facing a factory owner but what I found most interesting were the attitudes and approaches of my four fellow bosses. From the outset one woman raised the colours of untrammelled free enterprise. A trade union? Forget it – unions just mean trouble. She even opted to employ some children in the factory and saw the move as a sign of kindness. Another guy was more methodical and thoughtful, and made decisions for the future, while a third consistently selected the option making the biggest immediate profit.

At the end every participant is handed a printout of all the group’s decisions and urls linking to the research behind the stories and incidents on the cards. It’s an interesting resource, and sums up the shows blend of serious intent and entertaining presentation.

+ Shirt: shirtmetisarts.co.uk/the-shirt

+ Digital Quilt: digitalquilt.info

digitalquilt.info/supplychain

digitalquilt.info/sewing

+ The Pattern: metisarts.co.uk/the-pattern

·         World Factory is at the Young Vic, 66 The Cut, Waterloo, London SE1, until 30 May. Info: 7922 2922/ boxoffice@youngvic.org