Money

Apart from the rush of theatre makers suddenly remembering that performance can actually be politically engaged, the best thing about the credit crunch is the sudden disappearance of all those books by economists from the best-seller lists. During the period formerly known as the Economic Boom, now renamed The Bubble, economists were delighted to entertain the literate public with their theories on Why Abortion Cuts the Crime Rate and How Swimming Pools are More Dangerous than Semi-automatic Rifles. They even demonstrated by statistics that working in McDonalds was more financially and socially advantageous than being a gangster, even if you had to wear a clown suit instead of a cool pistol.

Luckily, The Bubble has burst, and neo-conservative sociology has returned to those who know it best, the evolutionary biologists: despite the lack of comedic suicide plunging from phallic buildings, the economists and their buddy bulls and bears on the market have used the remainder of their fortunes to buy super-injunctions against the press. In the gap they have left behind, Marxist ideologues and the children of the rich can bicker about the government’s cuts, safe that no-one really understands money anyway.

Leaping into this space comes Clare Duffy. She might show some human sympathy to the hedge fund managers – the tragedy of Money is the personal cost of missing the market’s opportunities – but the game show half of her play is a witty explanation of how these traders in faith did their business. Reducing the complexities of subprime mortgages to a couple of competitions over blowing up and bursting balloons, she takes a big pile of pound coins, throws them around the room until they become meaningless. She works her two actors hard – they alternate between Performance Art Game Show Hosts and a business partnership knee deep in the decline of Western Financial Civilisation – and takes a cool look at the lessons unlearnt by bankers and businesses.

At heart, her contention that money’s value is an article of faith is familiar – Gary McNair has covered similar ground. But she refuses to offer solutions, accepting the big game of savings and loans as a given, preferring to poke at what is than dream of what might be. She pictures high finance as the ultimate casino, where the chips are made from blood and brain tissue. The form of Money mocks the pomposity of serious analysis – an audience running about, shoving piles of coins into children’s buckets and popping balloons recreates the stock market floor as a Saturday morning zany cartoon – yet retains, through the intrusion of scenes from the partnership’s development and dissolution, an appropriately tragic tone. If sometimes these scenes fail to gel – the switch from fun-time cheerleader to intense money maker is a big jump – it emphasises the problems of bringing international economics to the human scale.

Ultimately, the failure to offer solutions prevents Money from becoming a simple tale of good and evil: the central image, the big pile of cash, is powerful enough in itself and the play is merely a way of meditating on its meaning and value. Certainly, this is a work that invites further refinement. But it has the overwhelming virtue of being politically engaged, intelligently researched and never evangelical.