Wealth is not like a cake, it is more like a seed

Anew play called Dessert opens at the Southwark Playhouse this week. Its poster depicts a chocolate cake with the numeral “5” iced on it. A very small slice of the cake is inscribed with the numerals “95”. The rich own a very large slice of everything and most people don’t, you see.

Dessert’s director is Sir Trevor Nunn. In The Guardian on Saturday, he railed against economic inequality, expressing “incomprehension” that the man who “so commendably started a company he called Amazon in his garage… now has a personal fortune of $83 billion”.

Why does Sir Trevor find this incomprehensible? Jeff Bezos invented a service which hundreds of millions of people are happy to pay for, and he owns lots of it. So he gets a big proportion of the profits. This does not make him a good or a bad man, but it makes sense. Can Sir Trevor think of a system which better encourages the provision of goods or services for the many? If he banned the Bezoses of this world from getting the rewards, there would be fewer inventions. We would gradually grow poorer, as always happens in Communist countries.

At this point in the argument, Sir Trevor wrestles with the fact that he, too, is jolly rich – or, as he more delicately puts it, “have had my share of good luck”. He made a bomb out of Les Misérables and Cats. That’s OK, though, he suggests, because he was surprised by his success, and “my surprise didn’t become a determination to get richer”. But really Sir Trevor’s surprise and his professed lack of greed are neither here nor there: the work he produced was much liked and sold extremely well. So he is fully entitled to his slice. He accepted it, and bought nice houses etc with it, which suggests he sees no wrong in the system. I would be absolutely amazed if he has not been, for more than 30 years, one of the five per cent which Dessert condemns.

Sir Trevor’s intellectual mistake is captured by that poster image of the cake. If the world’s wealth were like a cake, then the share of the slices would indeed become the key moral question. But it isn’t. Wealth is more like a seed. It grows into a plant, and that plant drops more seeds, and so on. So the essential thing is that as many people as possible should be free to plant as many seeds as possible and profit from whatever plants flourish. Inequality will certainly result, but so will a much wider prosperity.

Dessert is one of a rash of plays which approach such questions in a similar spirit, as if inequality were unquestionably disgusting. Another is a play called Common at the National Theatre, which is about wonderful rural poor in the early 19th century and their horrible rich landlords. Audiences have walked out. Even Left-wing critics have admitted it is, well, not very good. One grizzled veteran told me it was “undoubtedly the worst play I have ever seen at the National”.

Of course, inequality can be a good subject for drama, and a Left-wing play is not necessarily a bad one. But one cannot help wondering whether directorial standards slip because the playwright has the “correct” views. The subsidised theatre has the hilarious illusion that it is being “brave” when it attacks the rich, the Tories, Leave supporters, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and so on, when really it is repeating the orthodoxies of the majority of those who work in it.

If Sir Trevor, or Rufus Norris of the National, were to mount a sympathetic play about the triumph and tragedy of Theresa May’s first year as leader of the Conservative Party (which falls tomorrow), showing her as the victim of sexism, snobbery, euro-enthusiasts, the BBC and Corbynist trolls, that really would take courage.

Last week, I drove to the peaceful Northamptonshire village of Greens Norton for the memorial service for Tristan Voorspuy. Tristan was an outstanding African conservationist, the guide of many thrilling (almost too thrilling) wildlife safaris. Earlier this year, the lands in Kenya which he stewarded were invaded by politically organised gangs, forcing thousands of cattle on to the conservation areas and committing acts of violence. Tristan rode up on his horse to see what was going on, and was shot dead.

So many of Tristan’s family and friends had gathered in the broiling heat that the church was full 45 minutes before the service, and the rest of us had to sit in a nearby marquee. That too overflowed and the later arrivals had to stand in the churchyard. We were treated to classics of pioneer culture – Kipling’s “If ”, “My Country” by Dorothea Mackellar and “The Man from Snowy River” by Banjo Paterson. The Blues and Royal Trumpeters trumpeted. Speakers recalled Tristan’s excesses, his courage and energy, his deep knowledge of African people, flora and fauna. The atmosphere was celebratory. The brutal nature of his death was mentioned, but not dwelt on.

I wondered afterwards why the occasion had been so uplifting. Part of it, I concluded, was that there was no self-pity. Tristan was killed for political motives, and probably racist ones too, but no one was disposed to claim victimhood and express rage. The mood was of acceptance that a life which exults in risk can end because of it, so we should mourn but not moan. In our timid, querulous, accusatory culture, what a relief that was.