Review: The Maddening Rain, Old Red Lion

Written for Culture Wars

Across the stage of the Old Red Lion, yellow arrows point to a door labelled ‘Stage Right Exit.’ The way out is clearly marked. Whether anyone will use it is another thing altogether.

The same could be said of the city trader stood before us: a sensitive soul in a suit, a lamb in scapegoat’s clothing. In the midst of the big-bucks boom, anyone could have walked away and yet no one did. Why would they? With its £400,000 bonuses, its after-hours magnums, Porsches and girls denying their Essex roots before you’ve even asked, surely the trading floor beats the “dead time” of bank telling or Marks & Spencer tilling, doesn’t it? You don’t even need to understand the economics. Felix Scott’s amicably, doltish self-starter hasn’t the foggiest what those around him mean when they start using “words like crash and recession.” That’s no bother, he’s just got to buy in, keep his head down and follow the first rule of trading: don’t lose money.

There’s a lot going on in Nicholas Pierpan’s monologue, which dissects the seduction of the city with surgical precision. He paints a vivid picture of contemporary London, twisting it from utopian moments of sunshine and sweethearts to a droid-filled dystopia inhabited by identikit individuals. No one really likes each other here; no meaningful common ground is shared. Hollow laughter rings out, bloated one-upmanship bounces around. Deloitte becomes “a human battery farm,” herding its workforce up to Leicester for a colleague’s funeral. This pack mentality is underpinned by a dog eat dog culture. Just as in the morality tale that provides Pierpan’s title, in which a town goes mad beneath a contagious downpour, the insane lead the insane. To survive, let alone to thrive, the sane must catch the bug. In Pierpan’s eyes, the city is infectious.

That sane man is our eyes on this world. But he only seems sane because of his candour. Thanks to Alison McDowall’s intelligent set, which shows us a backstage area with double doors leading to an office (that budget constraints leave too shabby by half), we know that Scott is not presenting the public face of this anonymous trader. He admits as much; that he laughs along at their jokes; that he bluffs and showboats with the worst of them. Here, however, he is very much a whistleblower.

The thing about whistleblowers is that their revelations lose force with hindsight. Come 1913, any old fool could identify the Titanic’s susceptibility to icebergs. So it is with Pierpan’s text: we already know the ills of greed. (Even the coffee shop used by the traders is called Mammon.) Dominic Savage’s brilliant television drama Freefall told us, Lucy Prebble’s Enron told us, thelondonpaper’s City Boy told us.

That turns the stage into, if not exactly the stocks (Scott’s character is too sympathetically drawn for that), then certainly a public tribunal. There is a touch too much self-pity and self-loathing about Scott, a sheepishness that appears too early. We know that it’s going to burst, Scott can’t afford to. From its outset, The Maddening Rain is an apology. Its tail is firmly between its legs.

However, that shouldn’t take away from Scott’s formidable handling of the narrative itself. Even if he doesn’t feel entirely real, you’re hanging off every word of Pierpan’s well-constructed tale, eager for it to unravel in spite of its archetypes: the wideboys and wizzkids sat side by side, the letches and lost loves, the blue and white collars. Credit must be shared with director Matthew Dunster, who handles a one man show like Nigella Lawson handles puddings. His touch is epicurean and enjoyable. What would be excessive with a larger cast, compliments the sparseness of the monologue form. Muted music, almost as if heard underwater, adds location; the sound of screeching tubes or landing airplanes, increasingly metallic and grating, suggests the impending crash; Emma Chapman’s ever-changing mood lighting, for all its tendency towards being prescriptive and unsubtle, keeps things visually exciting.

With new artistic directors Henry Filloux-Bennett, Stephen Makin and Kellie Spooner – seemingly a young and savvy bunch – replacing Helen Devine at the end of the month, they could do worse than set the bar with The Maddening Rain. It does exactly what Fringe theatre ought to be doing – albeit a bit late.

Photo credit: Jenny Grand