It’s a terrifically nifty idea to replay the recent meltdown of the global financial system as a series of children’s party games on which eager audience members place bets. Writer/director Clare Duffy cleverly sends up the absurdity — and decidedly unclear rules — of 21st century capitalism but isn’t ultimately able to post booming profits due to a slipping of focus in the final third of the show. Nonetheless, this child of the Rupert Goold/Lucy Prebble extravaganza Enron, complete with the same buzzing electronic ticker-tape screens of share prices, is a snazzy watch.
What’s indisputable throughout is the charisma of the two performers. Lucy Ellinson and Brian Ferguson (“I’m a numbers genius with charm”) play Queenie and Casino, hedge fund managers-turned-performance artists who are determined to explain everything to us via buckets, spades and a glistening heap of ten thousand real one-pound coins.
Swiftly, they divide us into two excitable teams and we’re soon betting long on who can blow a balloon up the biggest and then short on who can burst it first.
And if you happen to be on a team, as I was, in which one member can rotate both feet at the ankles by an eye-watering 180 degrees, so much the better.
The razzmatazz of a game show, all flashing lights and whooping exhortations, is splendidly handled; Ferguson in particular is a most affable host and would fit right in on primetime television. Yet the trouble is that the games are far more fun than the financial-biographical snapshots that intersperse them as the pound coins, watched over by an eagle-eyed bouncer, roll ever more liberally around the performance area.
Queenie, whose father was killed on 9/11 in the World Trade Center, and Casino made and lost millions betting both for and against the US sub-prime mortgage market and the Royal Bank of Scotland’s over-exposure to it.
However, the final spins in their story, played out without any audience participation to leaven the mix, left me somewhat underwhelmed. Watch out for the tomato ketchup, is all I’ll say.
Until March 9 (020 8743 5050, bushtheatre.co.uk)
