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Wankernomics
Show_v4.1_Final_USETHIS
Saturday April 4th
Athenaeum Theatre
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ stars
Wankernomics opens like a meeting you’d normally try to dodge – and that’s exactly the point. The Athenaeum Theatre is reframed as a corporate briefing room, with James Schloeffel and Charles Firth stepping in as slick, overconfident executives guiding the audience through a crisis no one fully understands. From the outset, the show locks into its premise: a world where jargon replaces meaning and every sentence sounds important while saying absolutely nothing. It’s instantly recognisable, and that familiarity is where the comedy hits hardest.
The humour is sharp, deliberate, and painfully accurate. Buzzwords are translated in real time – usually into nothing – while audience-driven mission statements spiral into corporate nonsense that feels a little too close to home. The staging mirrors the environment it’s skewering: slides, internal chats, diagrams – all the tools of modern office life turned into punchlines. Schloeffel and Firth are tightly in sync, delivering with the confidence of executives who have no idea what they’re doing, but absolute faith in how they’re saying it. The biggest laughs don’t come from surprise, but from recognition – you’re not just watching the joke, you’ve lived it.
The trade-off is that the concept is so specific it occasionally corners itself. Without a strong narrative push, the show leans into repetition, and there are moments where the pace softens as the structure settles into a familiar loop. But the writing is sharp enough, and the performances controlled enough, that it never fully loses its grip.
What Wankernomics does best is hold a mirror up to corporate culture and let the absurdity speak for itself. It’s less about big, explosive comedy and more about precision – clean, cutting satire that lands because it’s true. By the end, it feels like a shared release: a room full of people laughing at something they usually have to sit through in silence.
Words by Shelby Lane
