In James Graham’s The Man, quite a lot.
Ben is attempting his first tax return. As a sole trader, he has accumulated a year’s worth of receipts that must now be classified as either an EXPENSE or NO EXPENSE.
Except the receipts contain information no tax return can record.
A journey. A relationship. An embarrassment. A joke. A loss.
There are 24 receipts corresponding to 24 monologues, distributed amongst the audience and returned one by one. Their order changes every performance, meaning Ben’s life is reconstructed according to whatever the audience happens to hand back next.
It is an elegant piece of dramaturgy because the theatrical mechanism carries the play’s central idea. We rarely understand another person in neat chronological order. We encounter fragments, learn something new and reconsider what we thought we already knew.
Here, that process becomes literal.
It also creates an extraordinary challenge for performer Mike Howlett. He must recognise each receipt almost immediately, locate its corresponding monologue and move into whatever emotional territory it demands, without knowing what has preceded it or what will follow.
That could mean comedy after grief. Something seemingly insignificant before a major revelation. A moment that lands differently because tonight’s audience already knows something about Ben that another audience may not discover until much later.
Howlett handles those shifts with remarkable dexterity. When the production reaches its emotional peaks — whether through loss, grief or humour — they land.
But the randomness that gives The Man its theatrical identity also creates its greatest vulnerability.
Stories normally control rhythm. Highs and lows are deliberately arranged so tension can build, release and rebuild. The Man willingly gives much of that control away.
On opening night, the random sequence never collapsed into an extended run of emotionally heavy material, but there were stretches where the performance began to meander and I found myself waiting for something to shift. When it eventually did, the production immediately regained its momentum.
That is not necessarily a flaw that can be solved without undermining the experiment itself. The creative team could manufacture a more reliable emotional arc by ensuring particular receipts appeared at particular moments, but that would fundamentally change what Graham is attempting.
Instead, this production commits to the uncertainty.
Director Jo Bradley keeps everything else deliberately spare. A desk, piles of receipts and two boxes marked EXPENSE and NO EXPENSE provide almost the entire visual world.
Those boxes become a wonderfully blunt representation of the problem at the centre of the play.
Bureaucracy wants classification.
Human lives refuse to cooperate.
A receipt can tell us exactly what something cost while revealing almost nothing about what it meant.
A train ticket might be financially insignificant yet contain an entire relationship. A meal can have no relevance to taxable income while becoming inseparable from the person who shared it with you.
The receipts are therefore more than symbols of Ben’s memories.
They are evidence that those moments happened.
Someone travelled somewhere. Someone bought something. Someone sat beside someone else. The experience disappeared, but a tiny piece of paper survived.
And Graham places those fragments in the hands of strangers.
The audience does not simply watch Ben reconstruct his year; we temporarily hold pieces of it for him.
That is where The Man finds something unexpectedly moving inside the deeply unpromising subject of tax administration. It takes records designed to reduce a year to transactions and restores everything those records leave out.
Emotion. Relationships. Memory. Meaning.
The random structure will not always produce the cleanest dramatic rhythm. Sometimes, perhaps inevitably, you feel the absence of the carefully constructed narrative arc most plays provide.
But when a receipt is handed back, Howlett looks at it and an apparently meaningless transaction suddenly becomes part of a life, the conceit works beautifully.
Because the cost of something tells us remarkably little about its value.
And something we would ordinarily throw away can, in the right hands, become evidence that somebody was here.