Thom Pain walks onto the stage and tries, unsuccessfully, to light a cigarette in the dark. He reads us something – in the dark. He discusses our collective human plight and whether the lights are likely to come on. He talks to us as though we’re in a therapy session. At times he’s mundane, at times profound, but mostly he’s relentlessly depressing.

This one’s for masochists. With the skill of a surgeon, Oliver Driver mercilessly inflicts the dislikeable character of Thom Pain on his generally affable audience.

Pain tells crushing stories from his boyhood and adulthood – of the death of his dog, being stung by bees and being stung by the love of his life – pontificates on the nature of the mind that willingly sets itself up for abuse, makes assumptions about and insults various audience members.

He’s telling us a story, with urgency, as though it’s something unpleasant he has to get out but it’s coming to him slowly, in impressions and bits and pieces. He veers off on tangents as though he’s unsure whether it’s worth talking about some of this stuff, pauses mid-stream, tells jokes to which he’s forgotten the punch line. He skilfully manipulates the audience, teasing us with uncomfortable silences and subtle sarcasm.

I wondered whether he’d get any heckles, as Thom Pain is a hybrid of stand-up comic, motivational speaker and storyteller, though he doesn’t settle comfortably into any of these roles. He directs questions at specific audience members – sometimes waiting to see if they nod or shake their head, sometimes not, but in either case making it clear he doesn’t give a damn what we think anyway. At one point he even clambers up among the seats looking for a ‘volunteer’. The mute crowd were either too well behaved, or too afraid of him, to heckle. Anyway, I suspect Driver would have had a stinging comeback for anything we could have thrown at him.

Playwright Will Eno seems to have been trying do ‘something different’ for its own sake. Oh dear. Unfortunately he threw the baby out with the bathwater. He’s been described as a modern Samuel Beckett, and if you like Beckett you may like this, in the sense that it is a nihilistic story full of linguistic gymnastics without a beginning or an end.

Thom Pain oozes ennui and bitterness, and gets it all over everyone. He is not an ‘enigmatic everyman’, but a self-indulgent, maudlin prat. The monologue seems to be a study on dashed innocence, mistrust, pain and consequently self-pity, for the navel-gazing Y generation.

Thom Pain isn’t uniformly despicable. There are moments when his hurt breaks through the glib facade and you feel a tinge of sympathy. Also, amongst the tedium of his generic stories of thwarted innocence told with the air of an avant-garde poet, lengthy pauses, tangents and asides, there are a handful of brilliant linguistic moments – witty, vivid, insightful. I only wish there were more of these.

Disappointingly, there is no redemption or watershed, no enlightening conclusion. Thom Pain is pretty much the same self-pitying loser he was 70 minutes ago. I was also expecting it to be funnier – that is, Driver gets his laughs where laughter is due, but the script doesn’t allow for much levity. I was reluctantly impressed by the ability to fill a room with people only to manipulate them into experiencing hopelessness, uncertainty and humiliation. Self-doubt seems to have been the objective; the message: life is a series of beestings from which we never fully recover.

One person walked out – it was pretty near the start so my guess is this was a plant so that Pain could say rude things and draw poignant parallels with himself and the rest of us who didn’t leave; someone else fell asleep (I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an act). Several others looked either bored or disgusted. 
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