We do care about the money, money, money
but we should laugh as long as we have breath. CLAIRE SMITH
0 Will you be sucked in and bled dry by £¥€$ (LIES)? Alexander Devriendt’s production counts as theatre at all. Yet it has a structure and a script, of sorts, and even if the audience are as much characters as the company members themselves, it has a sharp political purpose.
The company’s concern is the money market and the seemingly magical way cash is generated with nothing more than a promise or a bet. The audience assembles round a set of casino tables where a teller takes us through an escalating series of £1 million dice throwing gambles, issuing bonds and offering to improve the odds (at a price) as we get the hang of it. The more adept we become, the more our nation state turns from an industrial economy to a service economy and the more we are ready to trade in the stock market with our neighbouring comedic characters while the boys are portrayed as mostly serious dramatic characters wrestling with their buried passions.
It’s initially quite jarring to have David Crabtree’s blazingly camp Reverend sharing the same stage with younger actors convincingly struggling with their nascent sexuality. It doesn’t always work as the love affair between two boys (well played by Joe Bence and Joshua Oakesrogers) sits uneasily alongside the buffoonish authority figures’ attempts to “purge” the school of “beastliness”. countries. It is like an interactive version of Lucy Prebble’s Enron.
What happens – much as it does in game of Monopoly – is that the rising stakes start to play on our personalities. How irritated I was at the fellow banker who suggested we hold out for an equitable economy free of profiteering – a view I would have shared in any other circumstance, but not now with the currency on the up and something to be created out of nothing.
The speed at which it all happens; the primal instincts it appeals to; and the sense of chaos, confusion and loss it generates when the system collapses teach you as much about yourself as they do about the global money machine. MARK FISHER
The two storylines and styles grind against each other – noisily at first – but eventually settle into an uneasy rhythm. While Anderson’s film ended in armed revolution and death, this ends in a play-within-a-play that serves much the same purpose: an explosion of the id and the revenge of the repressed. It’s an engaging and frequently quite funny production rather than a complete success but its bold approach to the material is consistently interesting. RORY FORD