Hayley Atwell shines as an emotional robot
Hayley Atwell, fresh from a dazzling turn in the TV adaptation of EM Forster’s Howards End, is the best thing about this sprightly but undernourished comedy by Sarah Burgess, set in a New York private equity firm that’s been plunged into a public relations disaster after the director throws a lavish engagement party the same day he lays off workers from a company he has just acquired.
Atwell plays Jenny, a financial super-brain and emotional robot who simply doesn’t understand why her firm should be worried over a critical profile in The New York Times when the whole point of a business such as hers is to make money. When her colleague and office rival Seth (Tom Riley) suggests a deal that involves buying another company at a great price, she reckons that the only way to make that company profitable would be to move production to Bangladesh. Even he, however, a sycophantic narcissist concerned mainly with self-advancement, thinks that’s morally problematic.
Burgess’s premise fizzes with topical issues. Yet unlike, say, Lucy Prebble’s Enron, which blew open the gnomic economic laws that govern hedge fund companies and the like to reveal the seeds of the 2008 financial crash, Burgess isn’t ultimately that interested in the broader ramifications of how private equity funds behave. Instead her focus is much more hermetic: the farcically obsessive climate in which fund managers strike deals and strip companies. In order to do what they do, it’s necessary to wall themselves off from the real world. But at what personal cost?
You never really find out. Partly this is because Atwell intriguingly avoids tipping Jenny into the sort of highflying-but-damaged female cliché we’ve seen a thousand times before. Yes, she’s almost sociopathically odd (her idea of a holiday is a one-day flight across Antarctica) but in the highpolish cut and thrust of her relentless sparring with Seth, she is always in control. Burgess’s dialogue has a hint of Mamet’s hyper-masculine drive to it, but it’s much more glossy and never aggressive enough to wound. And herein lies the problem with the play, which, having set up its dilemma, never persuades the audience that anything much is at stake.
Anna Ledwich’s slick production, in which characters enter through a back wall of revolving mirrors to the strains of a harpsichord, as though they are players in a courtly dance, nods to Restoration comedy. And, indeed, much of what we hear is pretty funny. But Burgess never has much to say beyond the notion that people who work in high finance are essentially hollow. Not only does this make for a pretty hollow play, but it’s yet another example of a Hampstead show that feels fundamentally unessential.