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 schizophrenia – that are never adequately engaged with by the play (it’s possible – probably even – that Lord didn’t specifically intend Richie to be quite as ill as that, but it’s certainly how he comes across).
Much more successful are the lighter moments and the contrast between the fastidious, aspirational Richie, and Darwin, a goofy stoner who has lived a charmed career because he’s Nicole's son. This is where the good stuff is in Lord’s text: Richie’s naive subscription to the idea of the self-made man (he tries to play down Musk’s family emerald mine), clinging to the concept steadfastly in the face of Darwin’s blatant nepo baby success. And Darwin’s relationship with Nicole is fascinatingly awful – she doesn’t even seem to like him, but merely icily states ‘you are my son’ when he asks her if she thinks he’s good at his job.
Ultimately Anna Ledwich’s pacy production is stymied by the intrusive character of The Voice and the fact Richie appears to suffer from mental health issues so extreme that it's hard to see beyond them. Some vaguely annoying tech-bro isms seem largely irrelevant in light of how ill the poor guy seems to be. There is a better, sharper version of this play that picks out the issues it raises with more nuance and deftness. At its best it’s good, at its worst still promising.
