WHAT is the first thing you say to a taxi driver when you get in his (it usually is a man) cab? Chances are that it wouldn’t be “Do you believe in God?” So the taxi driver is immediately on the wrong foot. How on earth do you answer that? And where are you supposed to be taking this person because she hasn’t told you that? And, oh goodness, there are small children in the back with her – where did they come from?

And so begins the taxi ride from – well, if not hell, certainly one of the more convoluted of Dante’s circles of Inferno. The floral-dressed, self-described musician-singer and absent-minded mother of two doesn’t really know where she is going, and it takes some prompts from the driver before she says she is going to buy a horse.

In between the increasingly stressed description of this peculiar customer – dubbed Dippy (as in hippy-dippy) – the taxi driver has to deal with a string of incoming calls to the office, a regular and evidently fairly elderly client, a somewhat threatening person (who may be his brother-in-law) and fellow drivers all trying to not take a fare who is clearly an unpleasant/drunk/violent/unpopular customer. All in a day’s work …

Rank – and yes there is a bit of word play going on, with the principal meaning relating to a taxi rank, but also the sense of things or places being rank – is the story of a particularly difficult day in the life of a taxi driver who we can call Dan, since this is based on a true story by the Frome-based writer-actor Dan Gaisford, who handles the complex monologue with energy and emotion.

Dan is just an ordinary, decent bloke who drives a cab for a living. He tries to be kind and sympathetic to his passengers, and tries and mostly succeeds in not getting caught up in political or religious arguments, conspiracy theories or the thousand and one other things that people find to talk about, once they have navigated the embarrassing decision whether they should sit in the front seat or in the back!

Often funny, occasionally disturbing and sometimes puzzling, this play may well make you think twice about taxi drivers, before dismissing them as aggressive, grumpy, surly or just plain rude. It’s an acting tour-de-force, and you leave the theatre hoping that the chaos that Dippy has created has not totally swamped Dan’s life.

My one concern is the constant changing of the lighting, with different colours and a lot of flickering – for me, it was rather distracting, (although it may have been linked to cues for the actor, in what is a monstrous number of words to remember!)

The last dates on the current tour of OffPiste Theatre’s production of Rank are at Bath on 3rd February and Thursday 5th February at the Bay Theatre at Weymouth College.

FC