Money the Game Show

The sight of £10,000 in shiny coins on stage certainly adds a frisson to Clare Duffy’s economic meltdown-inspired play. Developed from a project sponsored by The Arches’ Platform 18 New Directors’ Award in 2011, Duffy’s show recasts our financial woes as an interactive game show in which audience members compete to win buckets of dosh for their rival teams, divided into ‘odds’ and evens’ on opposing banks of seating.

Hosted by a pair of comperes in shiny waistcoats, the games are sly analogues of recent economic history: trying to keep soap bubbles aloft before they pop, pumping up balloons until they burst. Amid the fun, Duffy is inviting us to consider the value and meaning of money. Like theatre, she suggests, money involves the suspension of disbelief, though a burly security guard is standing by in case anyone is tempted into testing this proposition with the piles of cash. Running alongside the games, the show’s comperes divulge their back stories. The conceit is that Lucy Ellinson’s posh girl ‘Queenie’ and Brian Ferguson’s hardscrabble Scot ‘Casino’ are former hedge-fund managers turned performance artists, and their personal histories illustrate the toxic risk-taking and greed that created our current plight.

There is much talk of US sub-prime housing, credit default swaps and ninja loans, and with graphs and graphics to match there are times when the play seems in danger of turning into a PowerPoint lecture.

Ellinson and Ferguson gamely throw themselves into their varying roles, but their thinly written characters lack dramatic heft. Duffy makes some sharp points but when it comes to incisive satire and exhilarating spectacle her play falls well short of Lucy Prebble’s Enron.