Sticks and Stones, episode 3 review: this conclusion was too trim and too convenient
After one episode of Sticks and Stones (ITV), I was hopeful it would turn into a revenge comedy. In the end, Thomas Benson (Ken Nwosu) connived a triumph over his bullying colleagues, but to deliver it Mike Bartlett’s script had to bend itself into weird and fantastical shapes.
Take time: the plot required Thomas to have an unconvincing inability to keep an eye on the clock. His watch, very conveniently, had broken. Then there was the idea that work colleagues know nothing about one another, which played fast and loose with the audience’s credulity.
Thomas’s chief tormentor Isobel (Susannah Fielding) turned out in a climactic reveal to be the wife of the very bully who had made his life a misery at school. It felt entirely coincidental that Thomas went to this figure to ask for help. Because he didn’t know they were married, when Thomas did gain his revenge, he had no idea his victory killed two birds with one stone.
Nothing made sense, least of all rich-as-Croesus Isobel working as a sales underling in a business park. When she revealed her true colours, who didn’t think, 'I bet Thomas will be getting all this on his smartphone?'
Fielding was icily convincing as the string-pulling puppeteer. Nwosu was highly watchable as a victim you really rooted for. Performances aside, Sticks and Stones never quite managed to moult its original skin as it made the move from stage to screen (it began life as the 2015 play Bull). The strongest scenes had a theatrical intensity but somehow they didn’t sit comfortably in a naturalistic setting.
The problem was that Bartlett, who has spoken of being bullied as a child, transplanted that traumatic memory to a workplace context. His characters – especially the two sidekicks Becky (Ritu Arya) and Andy (Sean Sagar) – were essentially puerile fifth-formers in business threads.
The conclusion was too trim: that like a judoka the victim can use an opponent’s superior strength against them and, in Thomas’s case, extort a million quid in return for silence. For anyone who has suffered real bullying in an office, there was no practical help provided by Bartlett’s bespoke office solution.
