Sorry, but these City slickers can’t shock us any more
STEVE THOMPSON’S play about City dealers, Roaring Trade, has been around a few years and has lost some of the vim it possessed when new.
A revival at the Park Theatre is little more convincing than a fuzzily computerised backdrop showing London’s Canary Wharf.
The story gives us f our dealers on the trading floor of a securities house, McSorley’s. One of them, Ollie, is a newcomer and is soon nicknamed Spoon because he i s posh (silver spoon etc, see?).
Spoon is given a rough time by Alpha male Donny. The other traders are drunken PJ and a woman call ed Jess who capitalises on her physical charms.
I do not recall being so
irritated by the show’s class angle when I saw the play six years ago.
Perhaps Timothy George, who plays Spoon, overdoes the toffish twittery. Yet why should it be OK for Spoon to have his class mocked while plain-born Donny is allowed to thump anyone who mocks his background?
Two solecisms: a proper posh kid would not say ‘toilet’ and would only say ‘pardon’ in the sense of a reprieve.
Nick Moran’s Donny is a convincing bully and Lesley Harcourt’s Jess matches him with her s el f - confidence. Michael McKell possibly overdoes PJ’s boozy swaying.
The show opens with a backdrop of dealing-screen statistics and the sound of chattering keyboards, yet I never felt I was on the rim of capitalism’s volcano. Maybe Alan Cohen’s direction is off the pace or maybe City shenanigans have lost their shock value.
The show ends with a halfhearted aw- shucks moment when Donny concludes that his teenage son is heading for a horrible corporate life simply because he is staring at his mobile telephone rather than talking to his dad.
Show me a teenage boy who does NOT do that.