Operation Blank
★★★★☆ Existentially funny
thespace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Venue 53): Fri 7 – Sat 29 Aug 2026
Review by Sarah Barnard.
When the end comes, will you regret the amount of your brief time on Earth you spent on Teams calls? Operation Blank at thespace @ Surgeons’ Hall makes us laugh, so we don’t cry.
Inertia. A sense of helplessness. Utter despair. All feelings encountered at a meaningless office job. Even when the stakes are high – say, nuclear war is about to erupt and it might just be the British government’s fault – the same frustrations apply. Strategic priorities are wildly out of line with the real world, and someone’s always accidentally on mute. Operation Blank skewers corporate culture with painful accuracy, and plenty of laughs along the way.
George Hall in Operation Blank. Pic: supplied.
George Grant plays a junior minister, aka “Junior”. Junior is stressed. An atom bomb has been dropped on Copenhagen and the Prime Minister and his other superiors (also all played by George Grant) are failing to grasp the gravity of the situation. There is no plan, beyond finding a way to blame it on somebody else. Most of the cabinet struggle to place Copenhagen on the map, let alone grapple with the geopolitical implications.
The scene that unspools is a hilarious nightmare of bureaucratic inefficiency. Operation Blank is an absurdist spoof of the worst meeting you ever sat through, most likely in a spinal position that isn’t compliant with the DSE assessment. For anyone who has ever worked in an organisation of a certain size, it’s eerily familiar and laugh-out-loud funny.
Between the tech issues, squabbles about the plan’s title, and deciding to outsource major policy decisions to the public vote, there are hints of something going on beneath the surface. After all, being stuck in your dead-end job really can feel like the end of the world. The show’s brief forays into the implied play-within-a-play inject intriguing elements of existential dread. The ideas here are interesting, but there isn’t enough psychological reality invested in the characters for this to land quite as strongly as it might.
inspired twist
The format has Grant onstage as Junior, interacting with himself as the other characters via “Teams”: a pre-recorded video projection. This is an inspired twist on the traditional one-man show, and rehearsed well enough that the seams never show. However, it is difficult to suspend disbelief, and respond as though these are characters having a spontaneous conversation. Perhaps in itself, that is another commentary on modern working life, but it doesn’t always work as theatre.
Notwithstanding some minor flaws, Operation Blank is a very funny show, well-written and energetically performed. With incisive things to say about the world we live in today, and a lot of great jokes, it’s well worth an hour of your time.
Running time: 50 minutes (no interval).
thespace @ Surgeons’ Hall (Fleming Theatre), Surgeons Quarter, Nicolson Street EH8 9DW (Venue 53).
Friday 7 – Saturday 29 August 2026.
Daily (not 15, 23): Various times.
Tickets and details: Book here at EdFringe.com.
Tickets direct from venue: Book here.
George Grant’s website website: itsgeorgegrant.com
Instagram: @itsgeorgegrant
TikTok: @itsgeorgegrant
ENDS
