Hampstead Theatre

As debut plays go, this one from Will Lord is pretty… debut-y in places. But he’s definitely onto something with his satirical look at workplace culture and ‘CEO mindset’ bullshit. Richie (Nathan Clarke) and Darwin (Ashley Margolis) are junior analysts at a company of vague scope. As The Billionaire Inside Your Head opens, Richie is expressing his admiration for Elon Musk to a skeptical Darwin. Richie is in awe of the tech billionaire’s gargantuan success, even if he concedes he’s a bit uneasy about his ethics.  Richie talks the tech bro talk. But as we discover in his interactions with BFF Darwin, not only is Richie languishing in a junior role, he clearly has… further issues. At first it seems like it’s something purely neurological like OCD or Tourette’s. He freaks out when Darwin jokingly does a ‘got your nose’ on him, pleading for his nose to be given back. He apparently needs to utter the phrase. ‘I’d fuck her’ to steady his nerves, which often turns out poorly for him.  But there’s more to it than that. Allison McKenzie doubles in the role of company CEO Nicole and ‘The Voice’, a hectoring monologue inside Richie’s head that spouts increasingly deranged advice to him. There are some good ideas here. But I found Lord’s depiction of whatever is supposed to be the matter with Richie confusing. A tech bro with debilitating OCD is a solid conceit for a character. But the ever intrusive Voice suggests he is suffering from much more serious issues – perhaps paranoid...

The late US playwright Richard Greenberg’s comedy The Assembled Parties was a big hit on Broadway in 2013 and now finally makes it over to Hampstead Theatre, which has often given smash US plays overlooked by the West End a London home. Blanche McIntyre’s production will star US actor Jennifer Westfeldt as Julie, a Jewish former movie star who insists on lavish annual Christmas celebrations at her palatial Central Park West apartment. The play visits them twice: once in 1980, at their peak; and again in 2000, as thing have become unravelled. Tracy-Ann Oberman co-stars as Faye, Julie’s troubled sister in law.