Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✭✩✩
written by Caryl Churchill, directed by Eda Holmes
Shaw Festival, Studio Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake
August 14-September 12, 2010
“Greed is Healthy"
The Shaw Festival is currently giving Caryl Churchill’s 1987 play “Serious Money” its first professional production in Canada. The enormous cast required and the demands Churchill makes of the performers and audience are surely what has put off other companies. The same demands make it ideal for a festival such as the Shaw.
Artistic Director Jackie Maxwell considers Caryl Churchill a “contemporary Shavian” and, while that designation doesn’t suit Churchill in general and her experimental plays like “Blue/Heart” (1997) in particular, it certainly fits this vicious satire of the stock market. The focusses on the effects of what was called the “Big Bang” in London, a deregulation of financial markets in 1986, a cornerstone of Margaret Thatcher’s government reforms to create a totally free market of open competition instead of one dominated by the earlier old boys’ club methods. Churchill captures the heady atmosphere of change and the ferociousness of the amoral dog-eat-dog competition it unleashed as new players enter the new market and take whatever they can get by whatever means. The play is remarkably prescient in its critique since the deregulation that created the boom in the late 1980s also created the financial bubble in the late the Naughties that burst exposing the numerous scandals and frauds. Churchill is already well aware of how the new system is ripe for abuse. Notorious insider trader Ivan Boesky’s remarked, “Greed is all right. Greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself”. Churchill quotes this in the play and it serves as the creed her characters live by.
The play takes as a prologue a scene from Thomas Shadwell’s comedy “The Volunteers, or Stockjobbers” of 1693. The purpose is clearly to show us that the desire to make money out of money is as old, if not older, than stock markets themselves. The play proper then plunges headlong into a series numerous short scenes set in the 1980s that cut back and forth in time and introduce us to at least 50 characters played by 18 actors. The overall effect is deliberately disorienting as is Churchill’s use of rhyming couplets to shape the speech of the modern characters. In Act 1 so much information and so many stories and characters are presented that one almost feels it is too much to take in. Yet, two main plots emerge. We meet Scilla and Jake Todd, the adult offspring of Greville Todd, a prime member in the old boys’ club. Both siblings are involved as traders in the stock market but early in the play Jake is found dead, a presumed suicide after his underground activities are investigated by the Department of Trade and Industry. He had been paid to provide American businesswoman Marylou Baines with inside information. Scilla, however, believes Jake’s death was murder and vows to find his killer and the stash of money she believes he had.
The second plot concerns Jimmy Corman, who wants to mount a hostile takeover of the prestigious and symbolically named Albion company. To help he calls on the American financial wizard Zac Zackerman for advice. Meanwhile, the South American Jacinta Condor and her African associate Nigel Ajibala arrive on the scene. Both Corman and Duckett, who owns Albion, vie for their support. Both main plots twist and turn with everyone ready to stab everyone else in the back.
The main problem with the play is that the enormously complex set-up and and convoluted action do not lead to a satisfying conclusion. Scilla gives up her search for Jake’s killer to concentrate on finding his money. Later she gives up even that. The Corman-Albion plot ends through the deus ex machina of government intervention. Both make satirical points but neither conclusion is a sufficient pay-off for all the effort involved in telling the story. It may be no accident that “Serious Money”, as Churchill’s most elaborate maximalist play, would soon be followed by a turn toward minimalism.
Eda Holmes must be commended for her exemplary direction of this demanding play. The scenes on the floor of the stock market seem like real chaos with all the buyers and sellers shouting at once. But this is highly organized chaos. The numerous scene changes are choreographed with utmost precision and Holmes uses not just the floor of the Studio Theatre, arranged in arena format, but the stairs leading to it through the audience. The effect recreates the sensory overload of being thrust into a human jungle where no one can be trusted.
The advantage of a play like this for the Shaw company and their fans is that with no good characters on offer, the actors have a chance to explore their darker side. In the original production all actors played multiple roles. Under Holmes, Marla McLean plays only the role of Scilla. This is a good choice because amid all the metamorphoses around her, Scilla provides the one thread we can follow to the end. McLean, often cast as an innocent young women, obviously relishes the chance to play someone so totally driven and unscrupulous. The same is true of Ken James Stewart. He is often cast as a boyish nice guy, but this time he successfully reveals a troubled background simmering beneath the façade.
Graeme Somerville and Steven Sutcliffe are often cast as amiable but ineffectual characters. Here, Somerville lets it rip as Corman showing he can be the epitome of nastiness. Sutcliffe is expert as Duckett, the meek British owner of Albion, but he reveals a completely different side as the tough American Durkfield, who fires his former boss as soon as he’s been promoted. Kelly Wong, another typical nice guy, oozes charm and self-confidence, but also amoral self-interest, as the African buyer Nigel Ajibala. Anthony Bekenn shines in two completely different roles--as Frosby, a former colleague of Greville, who cold-heartedly plots revenge against him, and Grevett, a supercilious financial investigator.
Lorne Kennedy and David Schurmann have played ambiguous figures in the past. It’s no surprise that Kennedy makes an excellent Merriman, a busman plotting revenge against Durkfield. Schurmann is assigned two different kinds of malevolence. As Greville, he shows no fatherly regard for his children. now that they are adults he callously treats them as rivals. In a small role as Gleason, an MP, he chillingly warns Corman of the ruin he will face if he takes over Albion with wonderful mixture politeness and menace. Among the men in major roles, only Ali Momen does not quite make his character of Zac Zackerman the forceful presence he should be. Churchill uses Zackerman as a narrator and in that role Momen is fine. But when Zackerman is called in from the US to Britain to fix things for Corman, he doesn’t hold his own with the powerful personalities surrounding him.
Among the women, Nicola Correia-Damude nearly steals the show as the money-obsessed Peruvian seductress Jacinta Condor. Her cheerful monologue extolling the accumulation of wealth at the expense of the poor is deliciously wicked. Lisa Codrington, as the American Marylou Baines, shows she play the evil game too but in a cool, matter-of-fact manner. Newcomer Ijeoma Emesowum is excellent as Marylou’s personal assistant T.K., mentally noting every technique Marylou employs in manipulating others. Helen Taylor plays to contrasting secretaries--Mrs. Etherington and Ms. Biddulph--personal assistants to the rivals Corman and Duckett. Taylor deftly differentiates the high moral stance of Etherington, outraged by Corman’s willingness to bend, if not break, the rules, with Biddulph’s growing impatience with Duckett’s handwringing.
Peter Hartwell, who, as it happens, designed the original production in 1987, has a four-sided clock like Big Ben hang over the otherwise empty stage with digital clocks for foreign markets above each of the stage’s four corners. His clever set consist of square and rectangular modules that can be combined into all many of types of furniture--a fitting design for a world in constant transformation. Kevin Lamotte’s lighting is absolutely key in establishing mood and setting throughout.
Those unused to loads of coarse language or to Churchill’s habit of overlapping speeches may find the show off-putting Fans of Caryl Churchill, however, dare not hesitate since this may be their only chance to see the play especially in such an exemplary production. “Serious Money” is worth seeing for the thrilling vitality that it releases in the cast. Churchill, born in 1938, does not need the excuse of “contemporary Shavian” to be done at the Shaw Festival. She is a contemporary of Shaw, who died in 1950. I hope that fact will allow the Festival to explore more of her works.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Marla McLean and Ken James Stewart. ©David Cooper.
2010-08-31
Serious Money