You get plenty of bang for your buck in Homeland for bankers
The Invisible Hand (Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn) Verdict: Greed is God in gripping drama
What might Damian Lewis’s Brody from TV’s homeland have been doing if he’d been a Wall Street hustler instead of a U.S. marine?
ayad akhtar’s gripping new play focuses on just such a character, holed up in a breeze-block cell in rural Pakistan. the only way he can secure his release is to play the stockmarkets and turn their insider information into piles of dollar bills.
It’s a neat idea, brilliantly executed and thoroughly researched. So well researched that it’s sometimes hard to keep up with the flurry of trader talk, about buying and selling ‘longs and shorts’.
But you just know that akhtar, like his anguished, super-smart New York yuppie Nick Bright, has it covered. that’s also all his captors care about as they are contaminated by the first law of filthy lucre: ‘Once you get a taste for it, you want more.’
the big shot Imam, played by tony Jayawardena, who is Nick’s judge and jury, sweeps in with freshly cleaned robes and equally well-laundered pieties. Money, not religion, he tells Nick, is the opiate of the people.
and so it proves here, in what is a decidedly capitalist twist to the story that positions money, not the almighty, as the ‘invisible hand’ that turns simple god-fearing folk into avaricious slaves.
the play is a coup for the tricycle’s artistic director, Indhu Rubasingham, and deserves to do good business.
Lizzie Clachan’s set is a studiously bleak and dusty little hellhole, but it’s the acting that really impresses. Sid Sagar is sweetly troubled as the gullible jailer trading potatoes and Parth thakerar’s Bashir is a hair-trigger Jack Russell from hounslow on a jihadist mission who falls under his captive’s fiscal spell.
But it’s Daniel Lapaine who really shines as the (wait for it) ‘lovable banker’ who is ingenious, impatient and, a lot of the time, terrified.
It’s a role that demands intellectual grasp and emotional range, but Lapaine is as focused as a trader in a free-fall fire sale.
Unfortunately, akhtar goes for a melodramatic ending, but he gives his characters a good run for their money — and the audience plenty of bang for their buck.