Last Updated on December 13, 2025
A witty workplace comedy enlivens a medieval tale
4.0 out of 5.0 starsCult British sitcom The Office (2001) set the standard for comedy drama about apparently unremarkable people. The show’s co-creator, Stephen Merchant, said in an interview that a great story “jolts [a person] out of their life and gives them a way of reframing it”. There couldn’t be a better mission statement for Felix Grainer and Gabriel Fogarty-Graveson’s new play, Gawain and the Green Knight, which retells one of Britain’s oldest folk stories as a screwball workplace drama. It’s a delightful piece of theatre that swells the mundane to mythic proportions.
This is not a traditional tale of knights, feasts and castles. Where the original myth begins with a meal around King Arthur’s Round Table, this version starts at an office Christmas party. Filing cabinets border the stage, tinsel hangs from drawers, and characters emerge from an elevator. It’s the last place you’d expect to find a four-foot axe.
Our Gawain is a sales rep in a cyber security company. Arthur, the fanatical boss played by Cara Steele (The Nag’s Head), is leading an “Arthurian rebrand”. She forces the employees of Camelot Corp. to adopt mythical names (Gawain, formally Gary). The office greeting is now “HAZAR!”, and the stakes of their operation have been comically heightened: “Troy would still be standing if it had better malware protection” touts the CEO.
Gawain, acted by co-writer Felix Grainger (Sniff), is a casualty of this epic revamp, deemed too “boring” to deliver the Arthurian vision. The play begins as he fights for his job – pulled between Gwynne (Laura Pujos – Miss Julie), his office crush, and convincing the execs that he isn’t “sparkless”. The drama turns on Gawain’s need to prove himself — to ‘jolt’ out of the status quo and take ownership of his life. Enter a mysterious green knight with a deadly challenge.
From here the play retells Gawain and the Green Knight with an adapted cast of mythical characters. The questing Gawain endures trials with eccentric inn owners, forest Dryads and a seductive housewife (as per the original story). Merlin the magician is brilliantly reimagined as an omnipotent AI chatbot who narrates over the Tannoy. This is folkloric material cleverly directed by Kelly Ann Stewart (Jekyll and Hyde) as a farce about ordinary people with extraordinary potential.
The play shines in its knack for identifying the grandiose in the mundane. The central elevator is treated like a castle gate — characters burst through the sliding doors with epic vigour. Reinventing the Tannoy as a prophetic narrator was similarly smart — who, after all, has not blindly followed this omnipotent voice while stuck in a queue? Wrestling a packet of crisps from the dodgy vending machine becomes a mini saga of its own.
The play rests on astute parallels between the high-flown and the humdrum. The script – which drifts into rhyming verse and likens Gawain’s impending doom to “a wasp at a picnic that won’t go away” – skilfully connects the mythic and the modern.
The four central performances are uncompromising and dynamic. Cara Steele’s leaps from crazed executive to medieval hag to forest queen feel like full-body transformations. Gabriel Fogarty-Graveson’s (The CO-OP) switching between macho office lad and countryside dandy is utterly convincing. And Laura Pujos’s understated clerk turned flirtatious housewife play off each other with great energy. I often forgot that the cast was only four people – such was the flair of the multi-roling.
Gawain and the Green Knight works hard to square the Arthurian context with contemporary settings and sensibilities, which sometimes brought snags. The first half felt more committed than the second to the logic of real life (Gawain goes time travelling after the interval). The plot point that justifies these time jumps — something about an AI simulation choreographed by the office executives — felt underexplored. And the romance between Gawain and Gwynne might’ve benefited from more generous reference throughout and a fuller payoff at the end. But the play is not intended as a mirror image of the source material; the Arthurian myth is the hanger over which the drama is loosely draped. It succeeds in infusing an old tale with new comedic life.
Gawain and the Green Knight revels in the fun to be squeezed from King Arthur’s Round Table. It’s Christmas-themed comedy that resists pantomime gimmicks to deliver a genuinely innovative take on a timeless story.
Gawain and the Green Knight runs at Park Theatre from 25th November to 24th December.
Park Theatre
Clifton Terrace
Finsbury Park
London N4 3JP
Looking for something different? You might also enjoy KENREX, currently showing at the Other Palace Theatre
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