Take a ride on the money-go-round

£ ¥ €$ (LIES) (Almeida Theatre) Verdict: Great fun in a global casino

LIKE financial experts and fiscal shamans worldwide, I have a very poor grasp of what drives global economics.

But don’t let that put you off this extraordinary piece of participatory theatre by maverick Belgian company Ontroerend Goed.

It encourages us to think of the world as a conglomeration of casino tables and is either a brilliant metaphor for macroeconomics or total nonsense.

An audience of 70 people sit at ten tables (countries) with seven players (investors) and a croupier (the bank).

We wager what cash we are carrying (min. £5, max. £20) in return for chips designated as £1million (you get your stake back at the end).

You start with a 1:1 return on your chips for scores on dice over three. Then it’s a 2:5 return for scores over four, and later 5:15 for scores of five or six. Money is printed, bonds sold and loans offered through the fiscal sorcery of ‘fractional reserve banking’.

Chips and bonds are traded from other tables, supervised by a shady committee (the IMF?). Mergers are encouraged and you can ‘short’ other players to win their losses.

Inevitably, the whole system crashes when bonds need to be paid and we vote to decide which table’s bonds to save to minimise our exposure.

The heat rises, music gets more disco and a gong is struck to mark the end of the session. The point is then explained by a trading floor staff member: we need to return to a system of trust to ensure some countries are not written off for making decisions that they may not have understood.

But, to be honest, I wasn’t sure if the game demonstrated the necessity of trust, or the worthlessness of it.

One thing’s for sure: every model of global economics eventually gets trashed and, as John Maynard Keynes put it, ‘in the long run we’re all dead’.

In the meantime, this is two hours of great fun with friendships developing across the board. For my £5 stake I won £53million and became the richest person at my table (if only art reflected reality!).

Neatly carpentered tables, soft black carpets and low lighting help us to fall under the spell of filthy lucre.

It could easily be a board game to blow Monopoly out of the market. A better title? Boom And Bust.