Richard Smith-Jones

Richard Smith-Jones runs the business side of the New Burbage Theatre Festival, a role he approaches with anxious, spreadsheet-minded devotion. He is not an artist and knows it, which gags at him constantly around the actors and directors he manages. He wants respect, a hit season, and to be taken seriously as something more than an accountant with a title.

McKinney plays him as a man perpetually one step behind the room, overcompensating with corporate jargon and doomed motivational schemes, and the show lets his insecurity be genuinely funny without making him a fool to dismiss. Underneath the flop sweat is real longing to matter to the art he administers, and that longing keeps him touching even mid-pratfall.