A new play about the banking crisis at the Bush. Writer, Clare Duffy, has spent a year or two badgering financiers and economists with questions about ‘the fundamentals’. ‘What is the value of money?’ she asks. ‘What do we want and need money to be?’ Her play has lots of zing and energy, and opens as a TV game show. The audience is divided into teams and individuals are hauled out of their seats and asked to engage in sporting contests with a big stash of 10,000 pound coins that gleam in coppery piles on the stage.
Then the show becomes a drama. We’re in 2007. Two bankers, Queenie and Casino, hatch a scheme to short the American housing market. A tiny investment of £5 million will net billions, should the bubble go pop. Queenie’s angry, foul-mouthed bosses are too thick to see the merits of the plan, so she and Casino start a private hedge fund and secure the backing of a rich investor. The trick works. Markets tumble. They make millions. But then Casino sticks all his loot into Lehman Brothers, which goes bust overnight.
The passages of drama are interrupted by more noisy games between members of the audience, and the constant flip-flopping between genres suggests a fatal flaw in the play’s conceptual DNA. My guess is that Duffy hadn’t enough talent or interest to discover the truth about banking so she sketched out a few scenes between greedy, shouty City thugs and filled in the gaps with game-show trivia hoping to conceal her lack of commitment to her subject. Didn’t work, I’m afraid. Nor did her attempt to transcribe a Latin motto from the side of a pound coin. It’s nearly there but not quite.
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