By the time my custody of the World Factory ended, I had used 3,000kg of cotton, 2,000kg of synthetic fabric and 505.75kg of non-recyclable fabric. This required 60 million litres of water and 3,000 litres of oil. In the process I had to lower the wages of all of my workers by one third, in order to retain the whole force, while paying them to stay in the city during the holiday rather than returning to their home villages.

World Factory is an interactive theatre piece, conceptualised by Zoë Svendsen, Artistic Director of the Cambridge-based performing arts company, METIS Arts. A Research Fellow in Drama and Performance at the Faculty of English, she carries the academic rigour of her work with the University into the research and development process of her theatrical pieces.
World Factory invites the audience to become the participants, taking part in a Monopoly-esque game, whereby they determine both the material fortunes, and that of their workers, of a textiles factory on the other side of the world. Dealers stand at each of the four corners of the room, seductively sliding past in air-hostess attire, slipping fake banknote bribes to each ‘factory table’ as those who sit around it are forced to choose between their profits and their morals.

But the dynamic of the game isn’t simply a binary between the two. There are two billion routes through the game, accommodating the shifting position of the audience-participants throughout. For Svendsen, there isn’t a choice: “Ethics and the way you act – it’s a false dichotomy. Ethics should be the way you act.” On the screens around the room, a film about Madame Wang, owner of a clothing factory in Shanghai, is projected. On the relentless pace of work in her own factory, she remarks: “All these dreams, I cannot not keep going forward.” The audience themselves is then made to move forward through the game by the chugging of pressure vessels and electrical mills on the screens around them.

World Factory is the product of five years of painstaking research into the capitalist supply chain by Svendsen. But it is also the product of a shirt. Madame Wang pre-sold 200 shirts to Svendsen’s company as a condition that they be allowed to film inside her constituent factories. The process of button-making, threading and stitching each part of the shirt was all recorded on camera to be projected in the room as part of World Factory. It is a slight disappointment that the rich backstory and atmospheric quality of the film fades into the milieu during the show. Audience members are too busy counting up the fake banknotes comprising their capital, or debating whether to take bribes. In effect, they are too busy playing the game.

But perhaps that is the point of World Factory. In one hour, the show’s running time, we hardly have the time to introspect on our decisions and reflect on their implications for those around us. It is cut-throat capitalism distilled into a paint that coats the walls of the auditorium in Cambridge Junction.

Perhaps there is hope for such performance projects to make a marked and lasting impact on the consumer choices of their audience. Members of the Cambridge Judge Business School attending World Factory mutter appreciatively about Svendsen’s performative brainchild: “It could be a great pedagogical tool for social responsibility.” A colleague echoes: “I quite like the added dimension of drama. I’m just fed up with the traditional case study method, it’s so dry.”

The issue still remains as to whether we have the time for this. Do we have the time, both in our tenure as the owner of World Factory, and in our own lives, to consider our choices, and modify them accordingly in line with an index of ethics? The words of Engels, printed in bold black on white paper are handed out to each member of the audience: “He knows that, though he may have the means of living today, it is very uncertain whether he shall tomorrow”. Do ethics have a role to play in such a world of global capitalism? Play the game of World Factory if you want to find out