Sticks and Stones, review: A bonkers thriller just as far-fetched as Doctor Foster
A post-it note is never just a post-it note when Mike Bartlett is calling the shots. With his thrillers Doctor Foster and Press, the playwright turned writer for TV brought shrieking melodrama to the sleepy world of middle-brow scripted television. He now tackles the pernicious topic of workplace bullying – and gives top billing to those little yellow rectangles, repurposed as devastating instruments of psychological torture.
The post-it apocalypse arrives towards the conclusion of the first of three episodes (Sticks and Stones is being broadcast across consecutive evenings). Coming to the end of a difficult week, harried mid-level manager Thomas (a grippingly unravelled Ken Nwosu) discovers sarcastic yellow labels affixed to every item at his desk (the stapler is identified as “this is a stapler” and so forth). He’s also found one attached to his back, reading “team leader”. Someone – assuming it is only one person – is taunting him as forgetful and shoddily organised after he mucked up a crucial client pitch. Eyes bulge, his lip wobbles. This is a man on the brink.
Bartlett’s special talent is his ability to discern Shakespearean turmoil roiling under the surface of everyday events. Doctor Foster started as an agony aunt query: what if your seemingly perfect husband is cheating on you with a pre-Killing Eve Jodie Comer? By its second season, it went to places Hollywood would have rejected as farfetched and overwrought. Bartlett threatens to reprise that party piece here as Thomas faints at an important presentation and is then subjected to a relentless campaign of harassment, apparently by resentful underlings.
In the real world, a desk plastered with pathological post-it notes would prompt immediate HR intercession and the possibility of legal action if the employer failed to respond effectively. Here, it is merely the latest spiral in Thomas’s plunge into paranoia (it is suggested at one point that the bullying may all be in his head). Because, who, really can he trust? Not sneering juniors Andy and Becky (Sean Sagar and Ritu Arya).
Nor the initially sympathetic Isobel (Susannah Fielding, last seen throwing figurative daggers at Steve Coogan on This Time With Alan Partridge). She pretends to fancy Thomas but Bartlett lets it slip early on that she is actually in cahoots with Andy and Becky. It is entirely possible she is the one masterminding the emotional torture in the first place.
Bartlett has worked in theatre and television his entire professional life. Perhaps that is why he presents a white-collar job at a Reading business park as a descent into a dystopian otherworld (Sticks and Stones is adapted from his 2013 play Bull). He is, however, no less hysterical in his portrayal of Thomas’s life outside the office. His daughter is being bullied at school because of her deafness. Again, in reality, this would merit immediate intervention. Here, weedy Thomas is required to personally confront the aggressor’s sneering, slovenly father – a taxi driver, which feels like unfortunate stereotyping – and is mocked for his troubles.
Sticks and Stones rumbles along. As the bullying of Thomas intensifies and the coincidences mount up – when he needs a taxi in a hurry can you guess who the driver turns out to be? – plausibility is soon receding in the rear mirror. This is precisely how Doctor Foster went, so that, by the end, you half expected Suranne Jones, as the eponymous medic, to don a superhero outfit or spray her cheating ex’s windscreen with machine gun fire. With two hours left, it’s anyone’s guess where Stick and Stones goes from here. But it’s clearly headed somewhere wildly bonkers.
