The Billionaire Inside Your Head. Hampstead Theatre.

Will Lord’s assured debut play, The Billionaire Inside Your Head, affords one of the most uncomfortable opening monologues you are likely to see this year, delivered by a splendidly malign modern gothic horror creation whose ethereal presence will accompany you long after you leave the theatre. “Look at each other. Find someone across the room. Don’t blink,” the Voice, a blond, blood-sucking Scottish succubus in the form of a motivational speaker, instructs us.

Janet Bird’s grimy subterranean corporate set is transverse, and the house lights are up throughout much of the play, so it is hard to avoid doing what we are told. “Have you found someone… now answer nice and quick and out loud. Would you fuck them? It’s a simple yes/no question.” We get another five or six minutes of psychological poking and prodding in the same aggressively haranguing vein. This is Lord telling us, one supposes, ‘listen up and pay attention, this isn’t going to be a comfortable evening’. He is right.

The Voice in question, clad in a cream trouser suit and played with icy, psychotic precision by a glorious Allison McKenzie, is the tyrannically punitive externalised superego of the play’s protagonist, Richie (Nathan Clarke). Like all the best horror creations, she emerges directly from her character’s flawed inner psyche. Think Lady Macbeth’s relentless moral manipulation (though Richie is a pathetically ineffectual Macbeth), mashed up with Dickens’ controlling, shaming, and nutty-as-a-fruitcake Miss Havisham. Then add in a dash of a perfumed and perfectly manicured female Freddy Kruger.

The Voice’s real-life doppelganger appears in the form of Nicole, the overachieving and only marginally less judgmental mother of Richie’s schoolmate, best friend, and now co-worker in a debt collection firm, Darwin. That she named her son after the originator of the theory later dubbed ‘survival of the fittest’ hints at Nicole’s approach to parenting. She named her business “Potus Coatus”, so one supposes she has a sense of humour, too. “Why don’t you talk to me?” asks lazy, permanently stoned Darwin, the mirror image of hard-working, go-getting Richie. “I’m trying to get you where you need to be,” replies Nicole. “That doesn’t need talking”.

Lighting Designer James Whiteside delivers a flickering of lights to indicate when McKenzie shifts between Darwin’s real parent (Nicole) and Richie’s internalised parent (the Voice), though the characters are equally toxic. Why does Richie’s inner tormentor look like his best mate’s Mum? There is an Oedipal subtext here – basically, Richie fancies the pants off her. Richie’s OCD, which is the topic of the play, requires him to perform certain rituals to assuage the Voice’s crushing scrutiny. One of these is verbalising “Yeah, I’d fuck her” whenever someone incites the thought in his mind. Bad enough when it is a waitress in a restaurant and you are on a date, worse when it is your bestie’s Mum (or your bestie himself, there is bromance to be found here). At one point, Richie and the Voice have a full-on snog, which may well turn out to be the kiss of death for one of them. The Billionaire Inside Your Head is a psychoanalyst’s fever dream. Freud, who lived in his final months a mere stone’s throw from the Hampstead Theatre, would have a field day.

Richie, bedecked in a smart pink jumper and tidy chinos, has ambitions. He wants to be a billionaire, idolises Elon Musk (“stop trying to suck his dick” Darwin advises), repeats meaningless aphoristic affirmations, and talks brightly about “commandeering my mind space”. But the big ideas are mostly delusional, and the caustic, critical, complaining Voice will always sabotage him, even when she claims she is trying to help. In Richie, the piece delivers a potent and compelling portrayal of life with OCD, even if the narrative occasionally risks spiralling into melodrama.  Clarke plays his character as a kind of lairy South London spiv, but underneath the lad is a scared, lonely child.

A complication of sorts arises when a potential promotion beckons. Only one of the two lads can get it. For the other one, it will be curtains. Will it be Darwin, who chain-smokes joints and comes to the office in comfy sliders, an unwashed cardigan, and stripey shorts? Or will Richie finally manage to rid himself of his intrusive inner demon and step up to the challenge?  “Get the fuck out of my head, I can’t breathe,” he tells the Voice. Will she listen?

Director Anna Ledwich ratchets up the tension neatly and makes excellent use of Bird’s set (banks of filing cabinets set behind utilitarian desks). The emotional crises, when they come, are affecting. You will root for Richie and, in a different way, Darwin. But it is the extraordinary, quite literally terrifying Voice you will remember. This is a fine debut work with a gripping performance from McKenzie.

Writers: Will Lord

Directors: Anna Ledwich