THE POWER OF YES. To 18 April.
London.
THE POWER OF YES
by David Hare.
Lyttelton Theatre Upper Ground South Bank SE1 9PX To 18 April 2010.
Runs 1hr 45min No interval.
TICKETS 020 7452 3000.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/tickets.
Review: Carole Woddis 17 October.
The power of theatre when it faces real-life.
It’s a shrewd man who can turn ignorance to advantage. But that is exactly what David Hare has done with The Power of Yes.
Hare – a character in his own play – sets himself loose in the world of finance, in which he claims (hard to believe) to be a complete novice. It allows him to act dumb, to have many of the biggest players from the recent banking fiasco turn up and lecture him on how it all went wrong.
This follows hard on the heels of Lucy Prebble’s Enron and Steve Thompson’s Roaring Trade. But whereas those tried to make dramatic capital out of the story, Hare cleverly turns the story itself into his dramatic capital.
It’s a subtle difference. Like many Hare plays, this is a masterclass in theatrical journalism, verbatim theatre by any other name.
So named and familiar characters like George Soros, Howard Davies, Adair Turner give us the benefit of their wisdoms alongside anonymous whistle blowers – industrialists, journalists and stock exchange traders. There is also a female financial researcher to spell out historical context. And a female Financial Times journalist to sum up possible motives behind the UK’s own home-grown and undoubtedly least remorseful villain of the piece, RBS’s Fred Goodwin.
Zipping along in Angus Jackson’s smart, bare staging, occasionally augmented by back projections, it’s packed with info, some of which we already know, some hard to absorb at one sitting.
What it does do is leave you – as with Hare’s railway piece The Permanent Way – with an increasing sense of outrage (though it’s hard to think how the public could feel that more intensely).
Hare mischievously implies that it’s not just about the greed and hubris of US and UK bankers and academics, or the Gold Rush spirit that so ran out of control, but collusion on all our parts as consumers or beneficiaries of cheap home ownership. Strangely, whilst emerging as a damning indictment of Gordon Brown, pointing the finger at Alan Greenspan and nicely implicating Tony Blair, there’s not one mention of that earlier fanatical free marketeer and City deregulator, Margaret Thatcher.
The Author: Anthony Calf.
Masa Serdarevic: Jemima Rooper.
Myron Scholes/Adair Turner: Malcolm Sinclair.
George Soros: Bruce Myers.
A Leading Industrialist/ The Chair of a Mortgage Lender: Richard Cordery.
Harry Lovelock: Simon Williams.
Deborah Solomon: Lizzie Winkler.
David Marsh/ Tom Hush: Jeff Rawle.
A Young Man at the Bank: Christian Roe.
Howard Davies: Jonathan Coy.
Paul Hammond/ A Hedge Fund Manager: Ian Bartholomew.
Jon Cruddas MP/ Paul Mason: Nicolas Tennant.
Scott Rudmann, a private equity investor: Peter Sullivan.
David Freud/ Jon Moulton: Ian Gelder.
Ronald Cohen, a private equity pioneer: Paul Freeman.
A Northern Echo journalist/ Simon Loftus: John Hollingworth.
A Financial Times journalist: Claire Price.
Ensemble: Julien Ball, Mark Elstob, Alan Vicary.
Director: Angus Jackson.
Designer: Bob Crowley.
Lighting: Paule Constable.
Sound: John Leonard.
Music: Stephen Warbeck.
Video/Projections: Jon Driscoll, Gemma Carrington.
Dialect work: Kate Godfrey.
Company voice work: Jeanette Nelson.
Researcher: Masa Serdarevic.
2009-10-18 22:16:13