A Rich Man, the new play by Sam Brooks, opened last night at the Old Folks Association on Gundry Street and left the room in stunned silence before applause broke through. Set in a once-grand manor where a powerful man coughs out his final breaths upstairs, four younger men sit below, helping themselves to wine and whisky from the cellar and circling the uncomfortable truth that their lives are about to change. The drinks flow, but the comfort is gone. The night is long, and nobody gets out clean.
This is harrowing theatre. In-your-face and confrontational from the outset, the play doesn’t give the audience room to look away. Brooks’s script is taut and laced with dark humour, full of awkward silences and lines that land like low blows. The atmosphere builds steadily, claustrophobically, as each character navigates his own sense of guilt, complicity, confusion and pain. It’s a study in what people allow to happen when power is left unchecked, and the cost of speaking up feels impossibly high.
Mark Chayanat Whittet, Dan Cockerill, Sean Rivera and Max Crean deliver sharp, textured performances. There’s a constant undercurrent of imbalance—vulnerability disguised as confidence, shame masked with bravado. The dynamic between them is always shifting. They are young men trapped in a room, bound by something unspoken, performing versions of themselves they no longer recognise.
Sheena Irving is a standout as the housekeeper, drinking her way through the night—perhaps to forget what she saw and chose not to stop.
Alice Pearce is quietly commanding and her comic instincts are razor-sharp, but they’re delivered through a cool detachment that makes the laughter uneasy. There’s a stillness to her performance that draws focus and holds it and her presence lingers long after the lights go down.
Jennifer Lal’s design captures both elegance and decay. The space feels suspended in time, set against the crumbling charm of the Old Folks Association hall. Brooks’s direction resists overstatement—he lets the tension do the work. The pacing is measured, uneasy in all the right ways.
No character in A Rich Man is named. The absence is deliberate and powerful. These figures are reduced to roles and behaviours—pawns in a cycle that keeps repeating. But Brooks isn’t erasing them. He’s insisting they be seen. This is not forgotten. This was an abuse of power against the vulnerable.
At its core, A Rich Man interrogates exploitation and self-betrayal. Are these men complicit actors or pawns in a system they barely understood? Brooks probes denial, raising questions about power, agency, and cost without offering easy answers. It’s a timely reflection on moral inertia, especially when authority figures are unspoken and unmentioned, but vividly imagined.
The comedy lands sharp. Bleak clichés are interrupted by sudden moments of raw humanity. Laughter comes in gasps, often more reflex than relief. If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry. There’s a comedic sheen on the surface, but underneath it lies the reality of ethical and emotional rot. The shape of the story, and the space it occupies, feels familiar.
A Rich Man is not interested in resolution or redemption. It holds the room in silence and lets the weight settle in. What unfolds is brutal, intelligent, and necessary. This is theatre that confronts rather than consoles. It asks you to look, and keeps asking long after the lights go out.
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