There is a strong and timely idea at the centre of Work While They Sleep: what happens when even sleep becomes another opportunity for labour? Presented at Camden People’s Theatre as part of the UK/Brazil Season of Culture 2025-26, Filipe Pereira’s Brazilian sci-fi play, translated by Jenny Futuro, takes a familiar condition, exhaustion, and pushes it into dystopian absurdity.
M. is worn down by the demands of paid work and housework, and longs to recover the apparently lost hours between midnight and six. After following an online “sleep-working” tutorial, she creates W., a dream version of herself who can continue working while she sleeps. It is a sharp theatrical premise, and the play is at its best when it uses this concept to examine the invisible work that follows paid work home, the fantasy of productivity, and the entrepreneurial myth that every problem can be solved by working harder.
The treatment of entrepreneurship is one of the production’s more successful elements. The boxes on stage work well as both practical objects and visual metaphors: they suggest business, storage, production, fulfilment, and accumulation. As M. appears to achieve more and more, the emptiness of the boxes becomes increasingly pointed. What is the end goal of all this? The play is particularly good at exposing the hollowness of endless output, where productivity becomes its own justification and exhaustion is treated as a management problem rather than a human limit.
W.’s voice is also effective. Its comic timing is precise, and its emotional detachment gives the production some of its strongest moments. There is something both funny and unsettling in the way the voice treats overwork as if it were rational, desirable, and even liberating. This coolness works well against M.’s growing physical strain, creating a useful tension between the language of optimisation and the reality of a body being pushed too far.
However, the overall execution does not always match the strength of the ideas. At times, M.’s increasing productivity is presented in a way that feels too caricatured, which reduces some of the psychological complexity of the situation. The piece is clearly engaging with a specifically Brazilian political and economic context, but some of those references are difficult to catch without prior knowledge. The post-show discussion helps clarify this background, particularly around labour, precarity, and the political culture in Brazil, but it also suggests that the material has a depth the performance itself does not always fully communicate.
The movement and dance sequences are well performed in places, but they are too long and too repetitive to remain consistently compelling. Rather than deepening the argument, they sometimes slow the rhythm of the piece. The use of screens to show emails and digital communication is more successful, making visible the pressure of work and the way professional demands invade private time.
Work While They Sleep is a play with stronger ideas than execution. Its themes are intelligent, relevant, and often compelling, particularly in the way it connects domestic work, self-employment, and the impossible demands of productivity culture. The argument sharpens as the piece develops, but theatrically, something remains slightly underpowered. It is an interesting and worthwhile production, but not one that fully realises the force of its own premise.
Drama / Sci-fi
By Filipe Pereira
Translated by Jenny Futuro
Presented by Jenny Futuro
Running Time: 60 minutes
Performances : 13-16 May 2026