Max Wilkinson Guest Blogs for BroadwayWorld on Night City at Southwark Playhouse

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Night City runs at the Southwark Playhouse from the 10th of September until the 3rd of October.

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NIGHT CITY: THE INVISIBLE PEOPLE WHO KEEP LONDON RUNNING

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By Max Wilkinson

About 8 years ago, I was coming back on the night bus from a bar job I had in Waterloo, along the Old Kent road.

As we skirted round The Bricklayers Arms, I saw the flashing blue lights of an ambulance pulling away. There had been an accident on the junction: a delivery driver, their cheap moped and bits of their tortoises fluorescent bag lay in shreds amongst broken glass. But the driver was gone. It was such a sad image; tragic, slightly pathetic, anonymous. The broken moped would be quickly towed away. And that would be that. Forgotten as traffic resumed round and circled round the junction.

This is the first image of my new play, Night City, at the Southwark Playhouse, an epic new drama about the hilarious highs and devastating highs of the gig economy, focusing on a hedonistic taxi driver, a waitress with big dreams and a carer with a big heart who makes a fatal error one day and throws all their lives into chaos and a political conspiracy they will never forget.

The play was inspired by my own experiences of precarious work, friends’ and family, and many interviews with drivers, riders, carers and other gig workers.

I’ve always been interested in work. Growing up we didn’t have much money so my brothers and I always had to find odd little jobs. My first was age 8 or 9, stacking cans in a corner shop. Then it was selling Kit Kats out of my bag at Pokemon cards at ripped off prices. Then a brief stint at Super Drug, tree surgeon-ing, crewing, service jobs: anything really. I was pretty rubbish at all, or fired pretty quickly, but they paid the bills of any grubby flat share I had at the time, while I used every spare hour to write.

And I was sort of fascinated by them. This new world of revolving door and service employment means you enter into many lives and worlds but are invisible: perfect for spying, and all the characters and encounters I met or had on the way poured into my work. And as a weirdo who loves the Theatre of the Absurd, there’s no better place to look. I was fired from Super Drug for reading Animal Farm at the make up counter. As a tree surgeon assistant I trimmed hedges for a Canadian heiress who gave Chateau Lafite to her dogs. I tutored a kid who’s dad was high up in the Filipino mafia and apparently kept machine guns somewhere in St John’s Wood.

And the gig economy is often hilariously Kafkaesque and that’s what Night City tries to capture. I’m sure we all remember the recent story of the Amazon truck stranded on the Thames Estuary after attempting to deliver a package to someone on Foulness Island because the sat nav sent them that way. That is funny. But desperately tragic too.

And I never had to rely on these jobs in a profound and mature sense. I never had a family to support. And I was lucky to get into teaching in my late twenties and get out of the precarious job sector. I never had to drive a moped late into the night, skipping red lights and speeding to make any kind of wage from the brutal delivery food app platform I was working for. And then wiped away from The Bricklayers Arms like a stain.

Because this brave new world requires a healthy vessel.

It’s a well known fact that one of Travis Kalanick’s, Uber’s co-founder and former CEO, favourite writers is Ayn Rand , deeply admiring her theme of fierce independence, leaving outdated, big-state aspirations in the dust for radical individualism. And this is arguably the template for gigging mammoths like Uber and Deliveroo. Gone are the days of fusty, corrupt unions, of fixed hours and managers staring over your back. Now you’re a renegade, a rock star, tearing off into the night on your bike or car, the app your constant, plucky little sidekick. But if you start rejecting rides because they’re too far away. Or you don’t want to accept them because the rider is drunk and abusive, the app will increasingly lock you out, and of popular times or ‘surges:’ Saturday and Friday nights. And if your vehicle is damaged, if you fall ill for a period of time, claiming any compensation or sick pay is an arduous process of online forms that yields a nominal amount at best. And that’s to say nothing of Uber’s and Deliveroo’s ever-increasing commission they take.

Or the increased chance of death of injury.

A 2022 UCL study involving 319 freelance app-based food-delivery riders, found that they were three times as likely as employed riders to report collision damage to their vehicles. And riders paid per delivery also reported feeling under greater time pressure and were more likely to speed or ride through red lights and break speeding laws and 63% claimed to have received no road safety training or equipment.

In the States, working as an app-based delivery driver is considered one of the deadliest occupations. A landmark report by the advocacy group Gig Workers Rising documented at least 80 app-based workers were murdered on the job between 2017 and 2022, through car jacking and robberies. But these numbers could be far more: delivery platforms are not legally required to report on the job fatalities to federal agencies like OSHA, leading to a severe undercounting of deaths and injuries.

And that’s just deliveries. The gigging world is not just food and taxis. It’s a digitised, algorithmic system that’s pervading nearly all aspects of industry, of health care, of education. Of, in a sense, everything in our lives; of culture or romance. And that’s very hard to quantify, to protect rights and security, to not become a profile or a statistic.

But I’m not wagging any fingers. Night City is mostly about people, and humour, and joy and collective action and humanity in the face of this strange new world: to record and explore it. Many of us will be aware of the New Employments Bill coming through last year, giving statuary sick pay and the right to unionise, but time will tell if these changes make a profound difference, and if the rest of the world will make similar, positive steps. As after so many years of gloom in the face of corporate behemoths, it’s hard to trust governments and the casual erosion of institutions we take for granted and hold dear.

But I do believe there are now flickers of hope. And maybe a slightly better way through.

Night City runs at the Southwark Playhouse from the 10 th of September until the 3 rd of October.

For tickets and more information, visit: https://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/productions/night-city/

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_Originally reported by [BroadwayWorld](https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/Max-Wilkinson-Guest-Blogs-on-Night-City-at-Southwark-Playhouse-20260911)._