SWEET AND SOUR
Dessert, Southwark Playhouse, London
Oliver Cotton’s new play is being advertised with images of a chocolate cake, iced with the number five, out of which a tiny sliver has been cut and iced with a 95. The tagline reads “How big a slice do you deserve?”
The punningly titled Dessert vents its eloquent anger on economic inequality – the world of obscene executive bonuses, paid regardless of performance, of CEOs who profit from company liquidations, of top
bosses who can earn by Wednesday lunchtime what a typical worker earns all year. You couldn’t call it a measured response to these iniquities. But it’s a bracing, timely intervention – a forceful mix of agit-prop and domestic thriller that, like its protagonist, has fire in its belly.
Two affluent couples are enjoying a sumptuous dinner. Hugh Fennell, a multimillionaire financier, and his wife Gill are entertaining their American friends, Wesley and Meredith, at their country house. As they await the arrival of the dessert course, the chit-chat about second and third holiday homes develops into a conversation about the new painting Hugh has recently acquired for £240,000 and which may soon be worth £8m, if it’s authenticated as a Giorgione. At which point they are rudely interrupted – and I must announce that there are spoilers in the rest of this review,
The intruder in combat fatigues is Eddie, a soldier who has used the know-how he gained in Afghanistan to outsmart the security system of this ring-fenced property. It emerges that Eddie’s newsagent father lost his life savings investing in a Fennel subsidiary that Hugh liquidated, taking a huge pension pot for himself as he left (“My dad made a mistake and lost the lot. Hugh made a mistake and walked away with millions”). Eddie assures Hugh that he is not here for a debate and, in certain respects, he’s as good as his word.
For it’s essentially a harangue to which he subjects the four fat-cats now at his mercy. “If you never earn another penny, you’ve got enough for a thousand lifetimes,” he informs the financier, wondering why the price of the picture still excites him and why he might want to add yet more to his vast fortune by selling it. What is a human being worth? Could anyone ever be worth £9m a year? Hobbling round on a prosthetic leg (war injury), Stephen Hagan’s splendid Eddie is both disturbed and dangerously lucid, seething with sarcastic disdain for the super-rich as he throws out these searchingly-phrased questions.
It’s a pity that, by way of a counter-blast, all Hugh (whose inflexible arrogance is given a pathological tinge by Michael Simkins) gets to deliver is some mumbo-jumbo about the cosmic nature of capitalism and complaints about the strain of the job. But Trevor Nunn’s well-paced production manages to maintain a sense of issue-play urgency through the darkly comic twists of the plot and the fine cast (that includes Alexandra Gilbreath and Teresa Banham as the eventually empathetic wives) give vibrant support. Unabashedly one-sided, Dessert is a bit of a guilty treat.