Tag: Allison Mckenzie

The Billionaire Inside Your Head by Will Lord, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 20 September 2025

This was a really interesting and enjoyable evening at the theatre. We saw the second preview, so you might be reading this ahead of formal press night.

Janie and I highly recommend this play/production.

We are big fans of the Hampstead Downstairs, which rarely disappoints us.

There seems to be something about Anna Ledwich’s work as a director (which we have seen several times), when she works with Allison McKenzie, that attracts quirky people to sit next to us:

Wilderness by Kellie Smith, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 23 March 2019

Differently quirky people this time – no drink spillage but very interesting chat before the show…unfortunately they were a pair who like to chat to each other during a show as well, but never mind.

Meanwhile Allison McKenzie as Voice/Nicole opened the piece by talking at us, the audience…and then did so again a few times during the play. Be prepared to be challenged in more ways than one!

The play is about OCDs and the voices/compulsive thoughts that some people have in their heads constantly. The character Nicole is the personification of that voice to Richie, Nathan Clarke’s character. He and Ashley Margolis, as Nicole’s son and the OCD-challenged young man’s hapless yet caring friend, riffed off each other extremely well. All three performers were excellent.

As is so often the case at the Hampstead Downstairs, the design team somehow manages to get a lot of theatre out of a small space through ingenuity and some pretty impressive choreographed movements by the performers.

Enough of me prattling on. If you haven’t booked it yet, Janie and I suggest that you book it before it sold out. Read all about it here.

And if you are one of the people who was lucky enough to be in the audience on Saturday and you work out who I am, you might, if superstitious, be relieved to know that I am writing this on the Monday after, so I didn’t die the day after we saw the show. No fictional voice in the head bullies me!

See the show. We’re not kidding!

Wilderness by Kellie Smith, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 23 March 2019

We saw the third preview of this excellent play/production at the Hampstead Downstairs.

A link to Hampstead’s information on this piece can be found through this link or the picture below:

Wilderness is about a couple who split up, determined to make it amicable for the sake of their eight-year-old son. But of course it doesn’t work out like that.

Janie and I found this play a painfully visceral piece. Neither Janie nor I have direct experience of this scenario, but that didn’t lessen the power of the drama for us.

Anna Ledwich, who has directed so many of the excellent things we’ve seen at the Hampstead, has again done brilliant work with a new writer, Kellie Smith and a superb cast: Richard Frame, Natalie Klamar, Allison Mckenzie, Finlay Robertson.

An excellent, sparse set by Lucy Sierra added to the sense of cold and decay that pervaded the piece.

One element of the writing that I think deserves praise was how very irritating the main characters were, yet Kellie Smith managed to maintain a sense of goodness and vulnerability, such that we as audience members cared about them and cared what happened to them. One of the ways she did that was to prevent us from ever seeing the child at the centre of the tussle; of course we couldn’t but care deeply for the ever-absent child and the impact the play’s events must have been having on him.

One other event will stick long in our memories. Next to us sat two slightly unusual women; one young, one quite a bit older. They clearly weren’t together but struck up a chatting friendship. At the end of the interval, the younger woman came back with some wine and cake. She plonked the wine down in front of her (we were in the front row) and commenced with munching the cake, taking and expressing great joy in her victuals.

Janie and I both, silently, thought that wine cup was an accident waiting to happen, positioned, as it was, in the path of any late-comer who might be moving swiftly to their seat at the end of the interval. Within a minute, indeed such a latecomer arrived and indeed the cup and the wine were put asunder. To make matters worse, in her dismay and forward lunge in a vain attempt to rescue her wine, the young woman also dropped the remains of her cake.

“Oh no”, said the young woman, “that was entirely my own fault”.

In some ways, that silly incident felt like a comedic metaphor for the serious subject matter of the play. Meanwhile, I have been trying to work out if I can find yet sillier places to leave victuals and crockery lying around the house in order to maximise the chance that they get spilt and/or broken. Thought experiment only, you understand.

But back to this truly excellent play/production, Wilderness. It really is well worth seeing if you like your drama intense, up close and personal.

Plenty of seats still available at the time of writing; Janie and I would suggest that you book early to avoid disappointment. The production runs to 27 April 2019 and I hope it gets a deserved transfer after that.

If or when Wilderness gets formal reviews, this link should find them.