The Billionaire Inside Your Head, Hampstead Theatre

Last Updated on September 26, 2025

Moving psychological drama reveals the inner workings of OCD

A well-heeled woman in a white suit strides up and down the stage, scrutinising the audience. ‘I don’t like how you’re all staring at me. That’s a bit rude,’ she announces. She attempts to engage us verbally, but we don’t know if we are meant to reply when spoken to. Is this an encounter group or a TED Talk, or merely the breaking of the fourth wall?  This mind game – and several others that she plays with us – is disturbing and cleverly sets the tone for what is to become a complex psychological drama.

Two young men, friends since babyhood, work together in a basement office chasing unpaid debts for a debt collection organisation. Richie (Nathan Clarke), as his name suggests, has dreamt of becoming a billionaire since he and his mate, Darwin (Ashley Margolis), sold sweets for profit in the school playground. Richie has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). His desk, with its pencils and files neatly arranged, is a stark contrast to Darwin’s, which is chaotic. Although not discussed in the play, Darwin might benefit from some Ritalin for his ADHD behaviour, but he self-medicates by smoking weed at his desk. It transpires that Darwin is the son of the company CEO, Nicole (Allison McKenzie), a self-made woman and single mother who has given her work-shy son a job because ‘you are my son’, and has employed his ambitious and hard-working friend, as she has known him since he was in nappies.

The young men have a warm rapport on stage, and their banter is both amusing and reflective of the sorts of conversations young men have. When they are pitted against one another for a promotion, their friendship suffers. Richie begins to break down. While his OCD has, up until that point, been quirky  – a bit of tapping on the desk and the repetition of certain phrases four times – his mental health deteriorates when he loses his job, and the audience gets to experience the internal workings of his mind. It is a fine actor who can convincingly have a panic attack on stage.

Playwright Will Lord did not originally set out to write about his own OCD, yet he has created a character around it in The Billionaire Inside Your Head. This is what therapists refer to as externalising. He has skillfully constructed the sort of play that a psychologist might – taking us back to Rich’s childhood and the origins of his OCD, revealing the magical thinking he employed to help him feel safe when anxiety threatened to overwhelm him. The soothing image he turned to cope with childhood fears was the powerful figure of Nicole, his best friend’s mum, and here, Lord weaves in some complicated sexual desires for Richie to contend with. It is an inspired idea to make Nicole and The Voice the same actress. Allison McKenzie is terrific as the Voice /Nicole. Both characters are bullies and take no prisoners. The Voice is most accurately depicted as an example of the OCD bully, which berates Rich for perceived weaknesses, then consoles him briefly before beating him up again. It is like watching a coercive relationship. The only release from the fear is to obey the instructions of the Voice to perform ritualised behaviours. If only he could become the billionaire he dreams of, then all his problems would recede. So he believes. But does Richie’s goal of extreme wealth and success motivate him, or is it destroying his well-being?

Lord’s debut play, The Billionaire Inside Your Head, is also a clever subversion of the popular concept of manifesting. Nowadays, we think of manifesting as making good things happen to us, but people with intrusive thoughts – a form of OCD  – fear that their bad thoughts will also manifest, resulting in loved ones being harmed, for example.

The play is well-structured, so that while the audience may be in the dark about the mind games introduced at the start of The Billionaire Inside Your Head, all becomes clear as the ideas raised are woven into later parts of Richie’s thought processes.

The Billionaire Inside Your Head is directed by Anna Ledwich, who has had much success in bringing new works to the stage. The cast of three all put in strong performances. McKenzie was particularly terrifying and had the audience in the palm of her hand, discomforting us in a way that was accentuated in a small theatre. Clarke was terrific as Richie, who tries to hold himself together but falls apart and then, aware of the fragility of his mental health, starts to take back control of his mind. Margolis was very entertaining as Darwin, a young man who does not have to hustle much as he is pretty much guaranteed a job and a financially secure future, yet we get glimpses of the emotional cost of being raised by a parent whose energies have been directed towards getting to the top of the corporate ladder.

The Hampstead Downstairs is an incubator of new writers where I have seen some terrific new plays over the years. The Billionaire Inside Our Head is one such. The play is well written – both comedic and downright scary, with strong performances and the most accurate depiction of the internal workings of OCD that I have seen on stage. The three actors were all excellent.  A simple but effective set (Janet Bird) with lighting (James Whiteside) that buzzed like synapses misfiring in the brain, while the sound (Max Pappenheim) accentuating a panic attack was powerful. The intimate nature of this theatre worked perfectly for this particular production.

The Billionaire Inside Your Head runs at Hampstead Downstairs from 25 September until 25 October 2025,

Hampstead Theatre,
Eton Avenue,
Swiss Cottage,
London NW3 3EU

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