Writing from his own first-hand experiences in service and delivery jobs, Max Wilkinson wrote Rainer during lockdown in 2020 when the streets were apocalyptically quiet.
The production opens the new summer season for the Arcola’s acclaimed Arcola Outside space, after being developed through their Today I’m Wiser Festival in 2021. It will be directed by Nico Rao Pimparé.
Rainer is a solitary bicycle delivery rider, whizzing across London delivering food to whoever will summon her. From luxury flats to leafy suburbs, she loves to create stories in her head, re-imagining London as one of her favourite Sci-fi films or Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. She loves her life. Until her one-time lover disappears and reality starts to slip.
Max Wilkinson said, “I’ve always wanted to make a ‘City Play’ or film, where the city and its residents are as important as the central character. Things like Dylan Thomas’s Under Milkwood, Goodbye to Berlin, Virginia Woolf, stuff like that. But also with this fierce but lonely, sort of wandering poet at the centre of it. I also spent a lot of my twenties, like Rainer, riding constantly around London at night between service and other jobs and you can’t help day dream and mythologise the city just from boredom.
The play was inspired and written during the first lockdown in London, where the streets were apocalyptically empty, save for hundreds of delivery workers riding back and forth across the city. I think it was the moment when these invisible people became more visible and ‘unskilled’ or ‘service’ workers became ‘skilled’ or ‘vital’. The play is about that too: looking at this new class of workers and appreciating their importance.”
Rainer is at Arcola Outside 1st to 18th June 2022.
