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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Mogadishu – The Lyric Hammersmith ****

[written for The Public Reviews]

Vivienne Franzmann’s modern morality play won the Bruntwood Prize in 2008 and has now transferred from the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, to The Lyric. Mogadishu is an examination of culpability and victimization where the distinction between right and wrong becomes troublingly indistinct. The traditional morality play is updated here; the fight of good against evil, and the journey from transgression to redemption is re-cast in a new mold where there are no simple resolutions.

Amanda, a white middle class teacher, intercepts a fight between two pupils and Jason, a black pupil, retaliates by pushing her to the ground. An instinctive attempt to protect the boy condemns Amanda to a nightmarish circle of accusation and counter-accusation which threatens not only her career but also her family. Jason also moves to protect himself, not just from the consequences at school but also at home.

Tom Scutt has designed an effective set which transforms from a school yard into a family home and back again but is always encircled by a wire fence which defines the area of play, of move and counter-move. For the most part the scenes alternate between the school yard, the headmaster’s office and Amanda’s kitchen. Those scenes with the gang of kids led by Jason, who aren’t unanimously bad, are the most energetic and well-crafted of the play. Hammed Animashaun’s Jason brings enormous humour and charm to the relatively small part of the wittiest kid in the playground. Both Chloe and Dee are well realized and the dynamic between them has the authenticity one would expect from a playwright with years of teaching experience.

Fraser James was excellent as Jason’s disciplinarian father; the scenes between them had the audience wincing at James’ quietly menacing demeanor which hinted at a much larger threat behind his controlled exterior. Some scenes weren’t as effective: Shannon Tarbet as Becky perhaps overdid the teenage angst and she had a habit of playing to the audience, stepping outside of the scene with her body angled away from the other characters on stage. Rather tryingly, each meeting between Becky and her mother followed a similar pattern with Amanda tolerating her daughter’s tantrums as she railed against the passive approach her mum was taking towards Jason. Becky’s character is obviously there for a reason; a bit of a misfit, she too has ‘issues’ in what is a rather too deliberate attempt to show that middle class white kids have problems just like working class black kids.

There is perhaps too much of an attempt to tread carefully here. Amanda, being middle class and white, must have a black husband to counteract any doubt in the audience’s mind about her motivations behind protecting Jason; as if her having a white partner would somehow preclude her from understanding or having any sympathy for ‘black’ problems. There seems to be a suggestion that despite all the symmetry, the black with white, the two families who have lost someone to suicide, there is an inherent incompatibility which prevents the troubled black teen and the middle class white woman from co-existing. The resolution to the play is that there can be no resolution without complete destruction. Amanda can’t forgive even the well-meaning pupils and so gives up teaching, and Jason re-enacts the self-destruction he has witnessed in his past. This is a powerful play which has at its centre a very real and contemporary story but the themes it draws upon are timeless and I think this will ensure the play’s enduring success.

Runs until 2nd April

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