Rainer. Arcola Theatre.

Wilkinson’s one-woman show about a delivery rider boasts a great performance, but the story is thin, and the ending feels hackneyed.

6 June 2022

The producer and director of Rainer could not have found a better venue for the show that the Arcola’s outdoor stage in Dalston.

With the venue’s open-air space surrounded by what seems like a dozen buzzing bars, Rainer unfolds against a real-life sound-track comprised of snatches of pub music, traffic noise, police sirens, and the shouts and cries of evening revellers.

All of this noise might be distracting for a more intimate or stage bound work. But for a play about a sketchy cycle courier’s descent into a form of madness, set across multiple London locations, it provides a vivid backdrop that brings welcome amplification to some fairly thin (and sometimes hard to hear) storytelling.

The eponymous protagonist Rainer is a hard-working but unpublished author, whose main gig is work for a Deliveroo-type enterprise called Angel Deliveries. Here she conveys everything from dim sum to diapers all over London, on a trusty but rusty bike she names Jean.

Angel’s phone app is playing up, but an ebullient Rainer, who seems to be somewhere in the manic phase of a bipolar event, is thankfully still managing to get a furious amount of deliveries done. She is a little unconventional, delivering a hug alongside a sandwich to one crying customer, and posing as a fashion designer when making a drop-off at another, but hell, she has a stack of five-star reviews to boast about.

Unfortunately, things soon start to turn sour. Her new man seems to be ghosting her and there is a strange and sinister figure in a trench coat following her around London.  Not only that, but her rent is overdue, her therapist is hassling her about medication, and her employer seems strangely reluctant to pay her what she is owed.

Sorcha Kennedy is a gifted actress with an uncanny knack for accents and the ability to bring to life the many diverse London characters that writer Wilkinson brings her way. These include a dodgy couple angling to have a threesome delivered with their order, a sad old man she regularly eats meat pies with, and, in a genuinely funny vignette, the two spliff-smoking youths daring each other to slap a swan on the local canal.

Wilkinson writes pithy, economical, and believable dialogue, and it is in its depiction of the characters the courier encounters, and the conversations she overhears, that the play works best. We helpfully (if a trifle unambitiously) hear from the writer towards the end that “there is no message in this play,” but in fact it does has something to say about the downsides of the gig economy and the dangers that street couriers face every day.

Where the play lacks bite is in a story that does not really go anywhere. The plot twist in the final act is telegraphed halfway through, and the resolution feels contrived and unreal, verging on trite. It feels almost as if the writer is unwilling let the character fulfil the journey that he initially sets her out on.

Rainer Sorcha Kennedy

Nico Rao Pimparé Director

Max Wilkinson Writer

Alistair Wilkinson Producer

Jethro Cooke Sound Designer

Jamie Platt Lighting Designer

Zoë Hurwitz Set/Design Consultant

Duration: 1 hour 20 mins. No interval.

Full Disclosure: Ticket from Central Tickets