★★★✰✰
Multi-level marketing schemes, or pyramid schemes, are a well-known and much mocked presence in society. Recent years have seen the market shift to target a younger demographic, with ‘hey girly!’ Instagram messages from someone you haven’t seen in five years recognised as the first warning sign that you might be dragged into a “girlbossing” sales pitch.
Margaret Perry’s Paradise Now! tunes into this cultural phenomenon, following a group of women who have all been drawn into the all-consuming world of Paradise, an essential oils company that sells the dream of being your own boss and managing a small business. Each of these women is unhappy, and the company’s recruitment structure preys on this. Their desperation to find success and fulfilment lead them on a darker path than the one overly friendly upline Alex (Shazia Nicholls) sells them, destroying relationships, bank balances, and lives.
The scene is set with a woman lying on a sofa. She is silent, morose and staring blankly at the flickering lights of a TV. This is Gabriel (Michele Moran). We watch this stagnant image for a while, and just as you start to wonder whether anything will happen in this play at all the slights snap on and her sister Baby (Carmel Winters) bustles in, talking about her day and celebrating the fact that Gabriel made it out of the house that day—to the corner shop, where the top news is that a woman didn’t reply to her ‘hello’.
Perry’s script is immediately funny. The interactions between the two, and between the ensemble cast throughout the play, are natural, sparky and dynamic, the beats between lines the perfect length. Baby’s nonchalant remark that she was hit by a car earlier in the day is pitch perfect, and establishes the dynamic between the sisters with little need for exposition; Baby is the caregiver, always putting her needs behind others’.
There are several loose threads by the end of the play, but these enhance rather than diminish its impact. These serve to further the theme of a lack of connection. Each of the women drawn into this scheme is isolated: Carla (Ayoola Smart) has just moved to London, trying to make it in TV; Gabriel and Baby only have each other; and Laurie has undergone lifechanging trauma. The community that Alex’s Paradise Pack provides is a way to build relationships, but these are conditional—as the narrative unfolds, those who don’t make the sales get cut out of the clique.
Alex, who could function as the villain of the story, is instead framed as another victim of Paradise. She too is vulnerable, lost and uncertain of herself, despite the fact that she uses accounts of her panic attacks to get more sales. In fact, the only time we encounter a villain is in the form of the booming, offstage voice of Paradise’s founder and “She-EO”. Phrases like this are bandied around, exploitation framed as feminism and consumerist capitalism as liberation. Perry rips the curtain away from commodified, ‘girlboss’ feminism, revealing it in all its ugliness in an effective, tragi-comic way.
The costumes, designed by Hazel Low, are particularly effective. Gabriel’s neon-orange pantsuit presents her as desperate, her attempts to embody her new role as ‘successful businesswoman’ fitting like—well, like a cheap suit.
However, the play is overly long. There are several scenes that could be shortened or cut entirely without damaging the story’s flow, and these do weigh down the more dynamic or meaningful moments—of which there are many. There are a handful of lines that feel out of place (a discussion of Elon Musk feels like it’s trying too hard to be of-the-moment), and a couple of incidents where ambiguity goes too far and the connections between plot points are unclear.
That being said, the strength of the ensemble cast goes far to rectify these moments. Paradise Now! is a funny, heartbreaking and thought-provoking production that, although dragging at times, is well worth the watch. Margaret Perry is a playwright to keep track of in coming years.
Words by Lucy Carter
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