Hampstead Downstairs has been quietly cornering the market in thrilling studio theatre, and with Aaron Loeb’s R.O.I. (Return on Investment) it may have found its most audacious investment yet. This is a play tightly wound, relentlessly intelligent, and unlike anything else on a London stage.
Loeb, making his UK debut after acclaimed Off-Broadway work including Ideation, has written a sci-ethics thriller set in the world of Silicon Valley venture capital. May Lee, a driven young capitalist at The Montrose Fund, is hunting for her first unicorn – a billion-dollar start-up that will make her name. She finds it in Dr Willa McGovern, a scientist whose gene technology company, PreCure, promises to diagnose and eliminate cancer, dementia and diabetes before they take hold.
May’s mentor and managing partner Paul Montrose, a man who built his fund to save the world (or at least to say he did), sees the potential too. What follows is a story about what happens when three fiercely clever people get hold of something that could change the course of human history, and discover that cleverness and goodness are not even distant cousins.
The genius of Loeb’s writing is structural. He begins the play just after the pandemic in recognisable reality, then accelerates through time at pace, each scene ratcheting up the stakes until the world of the play has become disturbingly plausible science fiction without you noticing the join. Dr Willa’s trajectory is the play’s dark engine. She arrives as a nervous, slightly awkward academic pitching to venture capitalists who could eat her for breakfast. By the play’s second half she has evolved into something altogether more frightening – a trillionaire whose cure for cancer has made her untouchable and whose worldview has curdled into conspiracy, racial supremacy and a messianic conviction that she alone can steer the planet. That Loeb makes every step of this transformation feel plausible, rather than a scripted device, is remarkable.
Letty Thomas plays Willa with a control that makes the madness creep. She never reaches for the big theatrical gesture; instead, she lets Willa’s certainty expand like gas filling a room. There is a scene late in the play where she sits opposite a congressional committee and answers questions with the serene detachment of someone who has already decided the questioners are irrelevant. It is chilling precisely because Thomas plays it so still. By contrast, Lloyd Owen’s Paul Montrose is all restless energy, a man who does yoga badly and makes smoothies in a Nutribullet as though blending kale were an act of moral philosophy. Owen finds something more interesting than the standard tech-bro caricature. Paul is obnoxious, yes – casually bigoted, cheerfully manipulative – but he also has a strange, sideways wisdom, an ability to cut through complexity with observations that land like koans from a sensei who happens to wear a Patagonia T-shirt. The comedy Owen gets from Paul’s VR headset exploits and his tangent about Steve Jobs’s toes is beautifully timed, but it never lets you forget that this man would sell the cure and the disease if both turned a profit. Millicent Wong completes the trio as May, the most grounded of the three and the one whose moral compass you watch being slowly demagnetised.
Chelsea Walker’s direction makes the intimate Downstairs space feel claustrophobic and infinite. She keeps the play moving at a speed that abolishes any urge to check your watch – and in a piece that spans years from a single room, that is no small achievement. Rosie Elnile’s set deserves particular mention: a wall of compartments from which desks, tables and surfaces slide out and tuck back with the smooth inevitability of a deal closing. It is an elegant visual metaphor for a world where everything is hidden in plain sight.
The play builds to a final minute that I will not describe except to say that it involves a fourth actor, credited simply as The Woman, and it lands with the force of a twist you cannot see coming. Theatre twists are usually about as surprising as the villain’s confession in the last five pages of a whodunit. This one genuinely shocks because it reframes everything you thought you understood. I sat in my seat for a moment afterwards, recalibrating.
If there is a criticism to be made, it is that Loeb is marginally less assured with the romantic and sexual entanglements between the three principals than he is with the ethical and corporate manoeuvring. But this is a minor quibble in a play that otherwise fizzes with ideas and never once mistakes cleverness for depth. Where The Lehman Trilogy traced the long arc of American capitalism through a century, Loeb compresses the same moral reckoning into the near future and makes it feel urgent, personal and terrifyingly real.
This is one of the most gripping pieces of new writing to land in London this year. The returns on Hampstead’s investment are substantial, and you should get in before the market corrects.