Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Fatal flaw | 14 February 2013

issue 16 February 2013

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.

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