Interactive Wall Street brings howls of disappointment
REVIEW
In the picture: Audience members surround Jack Matthew playing a trader in the ‘boiler room’
The Wolf Of Wall Street 5-15 Sun Street, EC2, London HH✩✩✩
HY might you buy a ticket to this show? Could it be the art? Or might it be the chance to plunge into the world of orgies and drug-fuelled hedonism indulged in by Jordan Belfort – aka The Wolf Of Wall Street?
This resurrection of Belfort’s decadent and destructive life, written and directed by immersive specialist Andrew Wright, has taken over the four floors and 25 rooms of a row of town houses in the City of London.
The basement is the trading floor, or ‘boiler room’. It’s a soulless sprawl of desks and phones where in Martin Scorsese’s film Leonardo DiCaprio’s Belfort motivated his employees to extort customers into buying worthless shares, and then relaxed by throwing ‘dwarfs’ (this was before ‘little people’ entered the lexicon) at a dart board – a movie moment not replicated here.
On the top level is the bedroom of Belfort himself, played by Oliver Tilney, where he and his trophy wife Nadine (Rhiannon Harper-Rafferty) writhe on their bed while being showered with bank notes.
Between these floors, the cast shepherd the audience like sheep to witness and interact with other figures from Belfort’s world, including the FBI agents on his tail and most memorably Danny Porush – well played here by James Bryant – as he cavorts like a fleshy, potty-mouthed Caligula.
Director Wright maintains that by being part of this world his audience are affected more profoundly by its amorality than by watching the film. But that rings about as true as one of Belfort’s sales pitches.
The cast are good, but the artifice never goes away. And moving among these shouty, avaricious coke-sniffers is like being stuck in an audition full of people desperate to be cast in one of Scorsese’s films.
Apart from the well-stocked bars there is not much hedonism on offer – and even less art. So disappointing on both counts.