Published: 09 September 2010
by BEAU HOPKINS

HALFWAY through Nicholas Pierpan’s superb new monologue, the narrator pauses to tell the story that gives the play its title. 

A village is afflicted by a supernatural rain that deranges everyone it touches. When the last sane man is about to be torn to pieces by his neighbours, he resolves to drink from a puddle of the water. 

He will join them, he says, and become their leader. 

As an answer to the play’s governing concern – “what is the price of belonging?” – it’s a bleak verdict. But this startling satire of modern London presents such a vivid picture of the city’s impenetrable, status-obsessed elites that it unfolds with the compulsion of a murder trial. Standing in front of a bare set, an unnamed young man (Felix Scott) narrates his journey from Leicester comp to Square Mile high-roller. 

Straying through  temp agencies and dead-end relationships, he eventually wangles a job as coffee-boy on a City trading floor. From here, the slippery pole of high finance is ruthlessly scaled. 

But somehow the inner circle remains beyond reach: his laddish colleagues disgust him, while a high-achieving new girlfriend charmlessly explains how he “doesn’t tick all the right boxes”.  

Bitter and lonely, with the credit crunch decimating his firm, he resorts to violence to escape the city’s brutalising impersonality.

Director Matthew Dunster complements the script by keeping things simple, limiting his actor’s movements, and intensifying the narrative with bursts of music. 

This allows Scott, last seen in blockbuster Inception, to flourish. His bristling performance perfectly captures his character’s love-hate relationship with London, mingling deft impersonations of barrow-boys and rugger-bugger accountants with an awareness of his own vulnerability. The result is taut, gripping and immensely enjoyable. 

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