You Can Still Make a Killing – Southwark Playhouse, London ***

Written for The Public Reviews

In Nicholas Pierpan’s play the financial crisis is explored from a very human perspective. Starting at the beginning with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, old friends Jack and Edward have to weather the coming storm and they approach it in very different ways revealing a skewed morality and values bent out of shape by greed and fear.

Edward and Jack aren’t your typical bankers: Jack is a medic who quit when he saw how Edward was making a killing at the bank and Edward worked his way up from a comprehensive school in Croyden to Cambridge, and has a massive chip on his shoulder to prove it. Distanced from the toff stereotype, perhaps we can sympathise with these boys-on-the-make. They’ve seen an opportunity to earn serious money and they’re taking it not least because it allows them to provide for their young families. But as Edward misquotes later in the play, ‘there’s something spoiled in the state of Denmark’, there is a tragic flaw in the banking system and its corruption will taint everyone involved with it.

The two men cope very differently with the crisis. Edward loses his job at the beginning of the play then takes to hanging out in Starbucks hoping to get chatting to some hedge funders’ wives. When Jack is handed his P45 he negotiates by threatening to take his strategies with him and manages to secure his position for a few more months. Jack is ruthless and rides high on the adrenalin of making a deal, he goes to nudey bars and staggers home late to his wife and small daughter. Edward promises to be a different man once he escapes the toxic atmosphere of the bank. He accepts a job at the Financial Regulations Authority (a fictional stand-in for the FSA) prompting the funniest line in the play from his new colleague, Chris, ‘This guy’s got a third-rate degree from a first-rate university. He’ll make a perfect civil servant’. Edward seems to find his calling in the public sector; he’s bringing the crooks down, spending more time at home with his family and getting by on £44,000 a year.

Edward is a self-professed good guy; he wants to bring the cheaters to account and soon his friend Jack is in the firing line. But Edward is not a changed man and is driven by greed and the thrill of the chase just like in the old days. By the end of the play he has pulled some dirty tricks of his own, sent Jack to prison and supplanted Jack’s boss as the head of First Brook bank. He may sit at his desk like a king on a throne but his wife has left him and taken the kids and the core of the banking industry is still rotten.

The shape of the play is satisfying; Pierpan has crafted a story with shape and substance. Both men are likeable and despicable in equal measure. Their wives, Linda and Fen, are equally dubious. Fen plays at fitting in with the Fulham set, throwing a tantrum when they have to sell the house that she has ‘personalised’. And Linda strives to be like the hedge funders’ wives who she emulates but loathes. Marianne Oldham captures the prickliness false chumminess of Linda perfectly and Kellie Bright deserves a mention as Edward’s long-suffering wife Fen. Robert Gwilym as Sir Roger was less convincing as was Elexi Walker’s hard-headed Kim Lopez; both just your stereotypical ball-breakers. There was also a palpable lack of confidence with the fast-paced script. Almost everyone tripped over their lines on at least one occasion. Alecky Blythe as self-satisfied PA Emma was possibly the only exception but her talent lay in smug looks rather than snappy dialogue. The simple set designed by Alison McDowell was convincingly an office, a coffee shop, a flashly decorated house and a football pitch.

There is some very well-handled exposition in this play which explains some of the technicalities of the banking industry to a lay audience. However there were a few instances when it became heavy-handed. Overall the play was neat, thought-provoking and funny when it needed to be. The characters are mostly well-drawn but Matthew Dunster’s direction put up barriers between them. When Edward told Fen about losing his job, Fen reacted to the audience with her back turned to her husband which felt unrealistic. Often there were only two characters on stage and they stood at opposite ends of a long platform facing the audience. If this was a strategy to explore the de-humanising nature of the banking industry it didn’t work, rather it made a play about people rather than the impersonal banking machine feel artificial and that’s not what Pierpan seemed to be aiming for.

Runs until 3rd November

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The Flying Dutchman – ENO, London Coliseum ***

The Flying Dutchman was the perfect opera for a blustery April evening. There was a knowing laugh from the audience when the Norwegian sailor, Daland, sang of sailing over the rough seas; ‘such furious weather cannot last’. With regards to current meteorological conditions, one would certainly hope not. Wagner’s opera is more than just a study of poor weather conditions though. It takes the myth of the ghostly Flying Dutchman – a sailor is cursed by Satan to sail the seas eternally unless on one of his seven-yearly jaunts to the mainland he can win the faithful love of a woman – and turns it into a romantic fairy tale with a tragic ending.

The opera begins with a small girl on stage who watches as her sailor father leaves her to return to the sea. She has her story book and toy boat and is soon imagining rough seas and crashing waves. A digital display conjures a ghostly ship and the face of the legendary Dutchman in what is an exciting set-up for the story to come. The child’s bedroom remains on stage when the set changes to Daland’s boat; we are now in the realm of the fairy tale. But the energy and excitement portrayed in the girl’s vision dissolves when we first see the Dutchman. His ship crashes onto the stage but then we see him emerging from the girl’s bed only to take a leisurely seat at the end of it and sing about the action of the rough seas and the diabolical journey he has had in a completely static position. For my money I’d expect a bit of dashing about the stage to illustrate the point.

Other scenes do manage to heighten the drama but James Creswell’s Dutchman remains inert and wooden. Yes, the singing is primarily what an opera is about but Creswell proceeded as if he was taking part in a semi-staged version of The Flying Dutchman and not the same performance in which everyone else was engaged. The scenes in which Orla Boylan’s Senta dominates are the most thrilling. But where I can believe Senta’s passion as she throws herself about the stage with gusto, I can also believe in the ghostliness of the Dutchman – he certainly doesn’t have much flesh and blood humanity about him. Perhaps this is all part of the set-up as this performance seems to be going to some lengths to convince us of the everyday reality into which the Dutchman has stumbled. Senta is a factory girl and we see her amongst her fellow workers on the ship-in-a-bottle production line (a nice touch and an echo of the toy boat in the first scene). She brandishes the story book, which we first saw in the hands of the little girl, and daydreams of the Dutchman who to her is a mysterious brooding stranger longing for a woman’s love to save him.

So the Dutchman dressed in his frockcoat hails from the world of the fairy tale, momentarily fulfils Senta’s obsessive fantasy, and then returns to his world having wreaked havoc. This may have hung together as a story in an age of superstition but it is altogether more complicated post Freud. Indeed, Freud had a lot to say about myths and ancient stories and I suppose we could call the delusion that one’s love has the power to save the love object from the devil, the Senta complex. One can’t help but read more into this than ‘strange things can happen’. I feel that Senta’s tragedy, rather than being sublime, is tinged with the ridiculous as she stands in a factory singing about a character in a fairy story and claiming ‘I’ll go with him to the abyss’. But this shouldn’t detract from the excellent sung performances and some standout scenes – the pirate fancy dress party is a real treat. The interpretation of this opera leaves us with a lot to think about precisely because it doesn’t fit neatly into the form into which it has been shaped.

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Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me – Southwark Playhouse, London *****

[written for The public Reviews]

As tube trains rumble overhead it’s not too difficult to imagine the war-torn city of Beirut above the dark vaults of the Southwark Playhouse which is a powerful thought in the context of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, a play about the potency of the imagination in the face of despair. As an Englishman, Michael, says when he joins an American and Irishman in a cell in the middle of the Lebanon hostage crisis, people outside don’t like to think about their imprisonment, implying that if the outsiders don’t think about it they don’t have to imagine what it’s like. This play forces us to contemplate incarceration and this makes for an intense and sometimes uncomfortable play, the misery of which is leavened by some very fine comedy.

Three men are chained to the wall and forced to tolerate each other’s company which, despite all the arguments, is the only thing which makes the situation bearable. We only hear reports of Adam, the American, having been alone for two months before the arrival of the Irishman, Edward, and we get the impression that continued solitude would have driven him insane. When Michael arrives, the comic potential of the ‘Englishman, Irishman…’ scenario is not passed up. There are some great nationalistic gags and the Englishman’s outraged reaction to being personally blamed by the Irishman for the potato famine of ‘150 years ago’ is particularly good. The insults continue to fly when Michael, a priggish university don, says that the ‘dialect’ of the Irish would be beautiful ‘if not for their coarseness which is so self-defeating’.

There is great comedy here (watch out for the hitch-hiker and his backpack joke) but we are firmly in the realm of tragedy. There are echoes of Hamlet’s ‘I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space’. Hamlet calls Denmark a prison even though he is empirically free; the hostages are imprisoned but can escape their confines through dreams and imagination. Despite agreeing that an actor’s life must be dull, all three men act out their escape, whether through an elaborate fantasy involving Chitty Chitty Bang Bang or by imagining they are drinking together in a pub or celebrating Christmas. With not even a window to show them whether it is night or day, the men perform their attachment to the outside world by verbally composing letters home and imagining they are shooting films on the streets of Beirut.

Hamlet calls Denmark a prison which Horatio and Rosencrantz dispute, but no one can deny the reality of the hostage cell in Lebanon even though Edward can joke that it isn’t as bad as Strabane. The men cling to optimism and hope, trying to follow Hamlet’s philosophy that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me takes us on a journey through three men’s tortured and conflicted minds and forces us to contemplate the human condition in extremis. The play isn’t always easy to watch but it feels vital and important. The script is excellent, sharp and witty with only a few minor stumblings into earnestness; it feels obvious and unsubtle for Adam to pronounce that their captors don’t need to tear them apart because they are already doing it to each other. This twentieth anniversary production showcases exactly why this play received the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1993 and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. These men have personal failings in abundance but their strength and resilience is an exaltation of the human spirit.

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