Life is something from which most of us never recover, and the best that the nameless antagonist at the centre of Nicholas Pierpan's impressive, if over-extended, monologue can do is to look around at the carnage of his own making and declare, "I'm here." It's a qualified statement in a piece that at its considerable best offers the existential disquiet of Will Eno's Thom Pain and the comic misanthropy of DC Moore's recent Honest.
Like Moore's Dave, the antihero of Pierpan's play is a man who knows he's living a lie. Unlike his mate, Ross, who puts together a working bowling alley out of discarded parts, this Leicester Dick Whittington who comes to London armed only with two A-levels, and ends up a job as a City trader as the markets crash and burn, can't make the bits of his life fit together. The metaphor is a little too pat, as is the central idea suggested in the title of the wise fool who knows that his only option is to douse himself in the rain that has caused everyone else to go insane, so he's just like them.
But Pierpan's writing is often astute, capturing the odyssey of an everyman adrift in the city (conjured in loving, bus-route detail) who knows nobody, least of all himself. He can't even connect with his past in the shape of his sixth-form love, Sarah, who he rediscovers working in Kilburn M&S. The idea of the bewildered but canny outsider in a middle-class milieu of privilege is neatly conveyed. In a blistering performance mostly delivered from one spot, Felix Scott ensures that this man, who doesn't just have a chip on his shoulder, but an entire forest, is always fascinatingly watchable: a bit-part player who unexpectedly finds himself in the spotlight on the stage of life.
