Is the nine to five routine a mistake that’s gone on so long it’s now too embarrassing to fix? Lucy is an office manager at an asset management firm, by title that is. However she’s not prepared to be domesticated by her stifling office environment just yet. Garden is a comical one-woman show written and acted by Lucy Grace, and produced by Chrissy Angus. It follows Lucy through her attempts to navigate difficult office personalities as well as the photocopier, printer, scanner, shredder and binder of which she is in charge. It’s charming, funny and highly relatable to those of us who have, at some point, been boxed into a similarly dense office environment.

Following a “going green” initiative at Insignia Asset Management, Lucy rescues a potted plant – a dracaena – which she wrestles home and up to her London flat on the twenty-fourth floor. Now, with a taste for the outdoors (quite literally as she adds soil to the workplace cafetiere in the hope her colleagues will taste it and experience nostalgia for their childhood), there’s no stopping her. Soon the stage – her flat – fills with trees, pot plants, flowers, birdsong, and a pigeon. Nature and its removal from our day-to-day urban lifestyle is a key theme explored in Garden. For many of us, our childhood interest in nature diminishes as we grow up, block it out, and become heavily dependent on the man-made world we’ve created. Earthy souls like Lucy, carrying soil in their pockets and looking to add colour to the commute, seem unhinged and alien to what we expect from city life. However in other parts of the world, plants like dracaenas still carry symbolic importance to communities, we’re told. Are we really better off hiding away, ignoring nature in the concrete jungles we’ve created?

Garden is script-led, eloquently written and excellently acted by Grace; she’s a charismatic actor fully able to embody the Lucy she’s created whilst masterfully switching into the other roles such as the cold, sarcastic office old-hand, Tanya. “I’m on the outside of their world and not the inside of mine,” she says, in a comment on the party going on elsewhere in her block of flats that could also relate to her sentiments towards her office. Good for Lucy, though, refusing to let her wild heart be tamed or her curious, creative mind be narrowed by graphs, tick box exercises and workplace satisfaction sheets.

Garden is playing the Brighton Fringe festival until 15 May 2016. For more information and tickets, see The Brighton Fringe website.