Postal is a grayish comedy about a disgruntled divorcee in a trainee job she loathes with KiwiPost, an equally unhappy male work colleague, who is searching for love through "a weird internet thing" with, unbeknownst to him, a transvestite called Celine, and a Sri Lankan supervisor called Fanti whose bossy, overpowering nature ensures that while the post office is spotlessly clean it is never a positive and supportive workplace.

Each character has of course a back-story and each story is designed to tug at our emotions. Celine has tense phone conversations with her disapproving mother, while Fanti is struggling with the difference between the reality of her situation and her dreams of success, coping with her own and other people’s racial prejudice, and her evangelical zeal. Michael, an obsessive First Day Cover collector, has always been an outsider, while Fiona has a young son and is clearly struggling in the wrong job.

Her name isn’t Fiona but that’s what Fanti keeps calling her, presumably as a putdown. This occurred to the playwright when she was working in a Melbourne post office a few years ago and her unhappy experience there has been transformed into this wordy, bittersweet comedy about finding and making a meaningful life and getting things under control when everything is conspiring against you.

Despite being far too long at 90 minutes (sans interval), Kerryn Palmer’s production is uncomplicated and direct, using the Bats stage well and from her cast she has elicited robust performances. As Fiona (or Woman as she is called in the programme) Heather O’Carroll creates explosions of frustration that are both funny and emotionally painful as are her cautious attempts at seduction after a wine too many. Simon Smith as Michael and Paul Harrop as Celine tackle their difficult scene when the couple meets for the first time with aplomb, and Rashmi Pilapitiya tackles the role of Fanti with exuberance. 
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There is much to commend this premiere production of Lucy O’Brien’s first full-length play. A variety of clearly-drawn characters with strongly-rooted back-stories are united only in their mutual desire to gain or maintain control of their lives. Well-wrought dialogue and superb performances generate many memorable moments.

But a core problem seems to have evolved through the script’s extensive development process (without a credited dramaturg, it seems, to advocate for the play and playwright).

When Postal was read at Playmarket’s ‘Write Out Loud Wellington’ event last year, it was set in an isolated mail sorting centre, located in the Australian outback if memory serves. Yes, the metaphor stretched credibility; an ‘industrial desert’ was all that was needed. And although it was inspired by O’Brien’s experience of working in the back rooms of Melbourne’s GPO, of course it made sense to relocate it in New Zealand.

But setting it in the customer service area of a KiwiPost Shop is a change too far.

It is fundamental to the play that a postal worker Trainee (Heather O’Carroll) – the solo mother whose real name we never discover while she is consistently mis-named Fiona by her ebulliently domineering Sri Lankan boss, Fanti (Rashmi Pilapitiya) – is trapped in a low-paid, boring, repetitive, thankless, dead-end job. She works alonhside a socially-challenged obsessive philatelist called Michael (Simon Smith), who is her only antidote to Fanti’s debilitating onslaughts.  

The very different dynamic of a customer service centre does not serve this premise and it is problematical, production-wise, when it comes to suggesting the presence of customers. I realise it works for the scene where Michael becomes the Trainee’s first customer for a First Day Edition issue of new stamps that have to be presented just so. And there is also value in having the Trainee lose it in front of the (imaginary) customers Fanti is regaling with stories about her family instead of helping her. But for the rest of the play the customer-service setting is the proverbial round hole into which the square peg of the premise cannot fit.

Also poorly integrated is the convention of the manically upbeat Fanti addressing the audience directly, for no apparent reason, with stories of her perfect daughter and perfect husband, observations on Kiwi failures to appreciate other cultures, and exhortations to look on the bright side of everything.

Are we supposed to be the customers, I wonder? But later, in the Christmas party scene, after hours, she finds the place deserted, calls to her staff and hushes us … so bang goes that theory. It’s not wrong, just awkward somehow, not least because – despite Pilapitiya’s effusive performance – her stories are of little consequence. If the way she flipped at the end, from believing she was in total control, was directly related to all her harangues, they would better earn their keep.

Heather O’Carroll and Simon Smith are hilariously poker-faced as they endure the daily grind, redolent in their comic style of silent movie stars. Their rare moments of animation are equally delightful by contrast and the build-up and delivery of her big melt-down is beautifully handled, as are the consequences.

Inevitably, between these two painfully lonely people who irritate the hell out of each other, a strange attraction grows … except Michael is already in a slowly evolving phone-only relationship with another lonely heart called Celine, made wonderfully real by Paul Harrop. We know straight away s/he is a transsexual (yet to have the op) and Michael doesn’t know …

For these three the quest for love transcends the quest for control and, with director Kerryn Palmer at the helm, the tidal shifts they experience are sensitively and entertainingly navigated. Celine’s phone-call attempts to align her mother to her new reality are as heart-breaking as her salacious fantasy chats with Michael are funny.

Hannah Smith’s set design, given the brief, allows the action to flow effortlessly between work, living and social venues, abetted by Marcus McShane’s lighting.   

With so much going for it, I hope any further draft will find its way back to the soulless, mundane work setting that would more strongly support the basic needs of the story. (There are other ways for the Trainee to offend Michael’s anally retentive sensisbilities and to be provoked into yelling abusively at her boss.)

That issue aside, Postal is a very entertaining comedy-of-anguish.
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