The Overrun

About

A print works in an ex-industrial town runs eleven hours a night. The woman holding its line open by hand has been doing it for six years, since the machine that used to hold it open was written off. On the first night in eleven years the works does not run, a load of reams arrives two pallets short of the paperwork, a technician who has been in for four nights cannot be found on the floor, and a maintenance fitter whose car is still in the yard is not answering. Delphine Achebe is 49 and has signed every injury, every near-miss and every stoppage in block capitals for twenty-six years. That book has been counting pallets that were never received. A night goods-in clerk has been signing off four pallets a week that did not arrive, so the count Delphine has kept honestly is the thing that cannot be believed. Around that sit a production manager who knew for eight months and said nothing, a machinist with twenty-nine years who is the only one who can say what the stoppage actually was, and a technician on a roof who reported the same defect nine months ago and was told it was a setting error. Desire runs between Delphine and the production manager, who were something at twenty-three in a van behind the finishing shop and have worked eleven feet apart for twenty-six years without saying it in daylight. It is written out. It is never a reward: it costs something the clean version did not. Three honest courses of action are open in the first fortnight, and each is shut by a different person, for a reason that is individually correct. The escalation is not a body count, it is an option closing — and by the last week the protagonist is the reason it shut. The Overrun is an adult industrial tragedy about competence, the paperwork that holds competence in place, and what it costs the person holding the line by hand to be the one who signs. Nobody took anything. Everybody chose something they cannot take back. Five endings, five tracked variables, and no ending gives back what falls.

Cast

• D Delphine Achebe protagonist; night shift supervisor, litho floor no portrait yet
• R Roscoe Ferrant production manager; the other half of the van no portrait yet
• B Bryony Vasey maintenance fitter; found in the pit no portrait yet
• M Marek Dusza print technician; on the roof no portrait yet
• D Dilys Hart machinist, Kestrel; twenty-nine years no portrait yet
• N Nkemdi Achulu UNISON site convenor no portrait yet
• P Priya Solanki quality manager no portrait yet
• T Tobin Lyle transaction director, Ardwick Capital no portrait yet
• C Coll Fennimore assistant shift leader no portrait yet
• S Sian Prosser Marek's ex-partner no portrait yet
• C Callum Roath agency goods-in clerk no portrait yet
• G Gayle Nuttall Harrowgate Foods supply chain no portrait yet
• D Dermot Kaye gatehouse and yard no portrait yet
• S Sahiba Iqbal operator, Vantage no portrait yet
• R Roisin Carraher apprentice operator, second year no portrait yet
• P Payroll clerk HR payroll clerk; carries the TUPE notices no portrait yet