Roaring Trade
Soho Theatre, London
ONE of the really boring things about the credit crunch is that everybody’s talking about the credit crunch, and everybody agrees about the credit crunch. Nowadays the greatest taboo is disagreeing about the credit crunch, questioning its extent or raising an eyebrow at some of the media clichés about it. So far, there have been mercifully few plays about credit, so Steve Thompson’s new one is something of a trend-bucker.
Roaring Trade takes a critical look at a group of City bond traders. It’s a timely topic, although he does focus on the past halcyon days of easy credit and wild dealing. Using the old device of the arrival of a newcomer, the public schoolboy Spoon, the plot shows how he is inducted into the universe of high finance by a whiz kid, trader Donny, and his colleagues, the feisty Jess and the loser PJ. A small cast does have its limitations and the big buzz of the big bang is one of several casualties of this small-scale drama.
To sketch out the effect that their cash-rich/time-poor lifestyle has on their families, Thompson includes scenes which give glimpses into PJ’s rocky marriage to Sandy and Donny’s bleakly distant relationship with his son, Sean. In the best moment of the evening, Donny explains the principles of his work to Sean by using food leftovers on a McDonald’s tabletop. Although this owes something to Terry Johnson’s Insignificance, where Marilyn Monroe explains the Theory of Relativity using a toy train, it does radiate a certain charm.
As you’d expect from the writer of Damages and Whipping It Up, Roaring Trade is a fast-talking and fast-moving show which reproduces the edgy atmosphere of an investment bank and, like a modern morality tale, rewards the good and punishes the bad. It is fiction, after all. If at times the characterisation feels a bit overly schematic, the briskness of the writing is usually entertaining, with the foul-mouthed traders never at a loss for colourful putdowns.
In fact, Thompson manages to convey a touch of the glamour of City traders, while all the good liberals in the audience can easily hate the main villain because of his privileged background and the main victim because of his foul-mouthed arrogance. But the play also suggests that the British virtues of fair play are still alive and well in the shark-infested waters of high finance – and that simply beggars belief.
Thompson is much more convincing in his insistence that money-making is mainly a boy’s game, and his Jess character quite openly flirts with clients to get them to give up their cash. Between the men, the stakes are egos as well as bank accounts, and the competition among them, expressed in a comparison of their annual bonuses, is aptly described as “willy waving”. Yes, these boys are still in the playground.
Roxana Silbert’s efficient, if rather unexciting, production employs an attractive cast, led by Andrew Scott’s wired Donny and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s dynamic Jess, with Nicolas Tennant playing PJ. As the new boy, Christian Roe turns from wide-eyed innocent to bad boy with complete conviction, while Susan Vidler and Jack O’Connor provide excellent support as Sandy and Sean. Despite its flaws, this play joins Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money as a rare excursion by theatre-people into the dark heart of capitalism.
Aleks Sierz
