A land of puritans, snobs and socialists

Martin Vander Weyer on the British idea that businessmen are by nature greedy, heartless, incompetent or dishonest — or all four

Our local arts festival this summer included a community opera with a large cast of children and teenagers, playing to a capacity audience of their families and friends. The show was so full of joy and energy that I came out with tears in my eyes — but also a feeling of unease. The problem was ideological: Maggio’s Magic — book and lyrics by Peter Spafford — was a theatrical triumph, but it was also a vivid parable of the perceived evils of capitalism, a reinforcement in all those young minds of an age-old British prejudice against the profit motive.

The elderly Maggio keeps his puppets in a dilapidated inner-city warehouse, whose owner wants to evict him so that she and a gaggle of women in black representing Mildew Developments can exploit the site. Maggio pleads that he and the puppets have nowhere else to go. In pantomime style, the landlady asks the audience whether she should relent, or force Maggio on to the street. ‘Let him stay,’ we all shout, but she’s having none of it. She arranges, unsuccessfully, for the warehouse to be burned down for the insurance claim. Just in time, the puppets come to life and rescue Maggio from the smoke, and the wicked landlady is led away in handcuffs.

Arson and insurance fraud are, of course, unacceptable business methods in any circumstances. But up to that point — it seemed to me — the landlady had a reasonable case. It was her warehouse, after all, and Maggio was no longer paying rent for it. According to the rather persuasive Mildew ladies, it would have made a lovely wine-bar-and-loft-apartments conversion, giving new economic purpose to an under-utilised asset.