Review: THE BILLIONAIRE INSIDE YOUR HEAD, Hampstead Theatre

“Lock eyes with someone across the room and ask yourself, would you f**k them?” It’s a confronting way to open a play, and the first of many moments in The Billionaire Inside Your Head that forces the audience to confront the excruciating reality of living with OCD.

Indeed, our protagonist Richie (Nathan Clarke) often needs to tell himself whether or not he’d “f**k” someone – a stranger, a passer-by, even a waitress while on a date – to “log them in the system”. Writer Will Lord has struggled with obsessive-compulsive thoughts himself, and his debut play is a testament to how these thoughts – the urgent need to touch wood to present some gory disaster coming to pass, or to clarify that “I want to die” is just a joke – can shape a life.

Richie, alongside his affectionate yet often baffled best friend Darwin (Ashley Margolis), is working in the “basement palace” (a chaotic mess of filing cabinets richly evoked by designer Janet Bird) of Darwin’s successful businesswoman mother Nicole (Allison McKenzie). Raised on a diet of pre-fascist Elon Musk and a healthy dose of Apprentice candidate delusion, he carries the nebulous dream of being a billionaire.

Given this subject matter, it’s inevitable that we get a few scenes of ice baths and tech bro hero worship, themes that tend to fall by the wayside when we get to the main event, Richie’s OCD. It emerges that Richie’s compulsive thought patterns occur partly because of, rather than in spite of, his lofty ambitions.

For McKenzie is playing a dual role – she’s not just Richie’s best mate’s mum, or his boss, but the personified ‘voice’ inside his head, a pantsuit-clad cult leader lounging on top of the cabinets and goading Richie to violence with the so-ridiculous-it’s-convincing language of corporate hustle culture.

Clarke and McKenzie have an electric chemistry, and McKenzie especially is skilled at blurring the lines between being Richie’s mentor figure, the object of his repressed desires, and the personification of his mental illness. The scenes where Richie grapples with the voice inside his head, accompanied by James Whiteside’s punchy lighting design, are a masterclass in the eternal battle between ambition and self-protection – though in this case, the thing Richie needs to protect himself from is his own mind.

Partly because his writing on OCD is so strong, Lord sometimes stumbles when it comes to his wider narrative. This is also a play where not a great deal happens, so when something does happen – Darwin getting nepotistically put forward for a job for which Richie is more qualified – Lord hasn’t quite invested enough energy in making these relatively mundane corporate shenanigans compelling. As the stakes are raised and violence creeps to the surface, it’s the portrayal of mental illness that keeps us engaged, rather than these specific characters.

This is rich, layered writing on mental illness which avoids tired cliches of germaphobes forever washing their hands. To fully conjure up how OCD touches every part of its sufferers’ lives, though, it needs to be paired with a slightly stronger narrative of what’s going on outside Richie’s head.

The Billionaire Inside Your Head plays at Hampstead Theatre until 25 October