Discussion with the creative team behind RAINER (running at the Arcola from 1-18 June)

RAINER is about the London that I see around me but never on TV or in theatre, where young people spend more than half their income on individual rooms in overcrowded flats, where job stability does not exist and where a pint costs an hour’s minimum wage. As a society, we have to do realise that hand-to-mouth existence is not just in certain neighbourhoods, in other cities or even in other countries. It is all around us. Most young people live it day to day. Rainer, our protagonist and a delivery rider, is a typical Londoner. She is educated, sensitive, a tad cynical. And like most of us, she struggles to keep the balance in her bank account above zero.

Max’s play captures the absurd yet very real place that is London. Amidst the backdrop of multi-million dollar high rises on one end, and greasy chicken shops on the other, it invites us to look at what we spend our lives trying to screen out. I have loved this endeavour to paint a moving image of London, from the tower blocks looming overhead to the vomit splattered on the pavement, from the ghostlike glow of the streetlights wizzing by to the grotesque mouth of a man objectifying his girlfriend. Rainer’s bike is, of course, a storytelling device that provides us with the opportunity to glide through through the streets of London. But it is also a metaphor. The Sisyphean image of Rainer frenetically peddling around the restless city is the embodiment of a generation that does not know where it is going, yet can’t afford to stop and think.

Max’s play does a fantastic job in highlighting the huge social changes we all went through in 2020; having come out of lockdown after being isolated and seeing people only on laptop screens, to suddenly being in bars and restaurants full of people eating out to help out; the contrast of that crazy situation is shown brilliantly in the text.

It’s been great to work with Alistair, Nico, Zoë & Danni on this project; gathering a small team who are all passionate about bringing the show to life and supporting Max’s writing in delivering a fun, bold and dynamic love letter to London

London is this sort of maddening, frantic knot of people and problems, it’s very easy to prioritise yourself and keep moving in this kind of adrenaline-frenzied dance.

I think I’d like audiences to stop, a little, and consider the people around them and what they may be going through, what stories they have, as well as the architecture of the city and its history and the direction it’s moving in now.

I’d like them to celebrate places and people. And I think after years of being locked in, of a society becoming even more disconnected, we really need that.

Alistair Wilkinson / Creative Director of Wolab