Money the Gameshow at the Bush Theatre
February 24, 2013
I am not normally a fan of audience participation – after all I’ve paid my money to be entertained not do the entertaining - but in this case it was the best part of the play. It attempts to tell the story of the financial crisis using two ex hedge fund managers who now run a gameshow and we, the audience are the two competing teams.
Ten thousand pounds in one pound coins lies in a surprisingly small heap on the stage and we bet bucketloads of it on whether our team player will blow up a balloon bigger than their team player. Kind of stuff. And it is entertaining and the two hosts are good in their over the top roles. But somehow there is little real story to engage with through it. No real feeling of the personal losses rather than the corporate although they were mentioned. We knew one came from poverty and was ruthlessly logical and calculated the odds and the other an upper class gal who liked to play on instinct, we never really cared about them.
But perhaps we weren’t meant to. It wasn’t a play designed to show us the human side of hedge fund management, I think it was showing us that believing in The Markets requires the same leap of faith as believing in God. Three stars.
