London Theater Journal: Follow the Money

Simon Kane Lucy Ellinson in “Money the Game Show.”

LONDON â€" It felt like a good day to go to a funeral for the financial system that rules the Western world. My reading on the subway had been the Evening Standard (now a giveaway), which featured a lead story with blaring headlines about bankers’ bonuses and money laundering. (The next day I would awaken to a grim front-page essay in the Guardian on the same subject with the no-win headline “Too big to fail - and too big to manage.”)

Oh, well, at least it had been a sunny afternoon, for a change. And the comely couple who greeted the audience in the lobby of the Bush Theater were a sunny pair, with their neon-bright clothes and aggressive smiles. Their names were Queenie andCasino, they told us, and they would be our hosts for a show with a title that promised lots of good fun to anyone of capitalist tendencies: “Money the Game Show.”

An hour and 45 minutes later - after assorted jolly exercises involving balloons, party tricks, soap bubbles and a pile of (real) 10,000 pound coins â€" one of these two charming creatures would be dead, or brain-dead anyway. As for that big golden pile that we had been encouraged to eye so lustily, it had been shoveled into a big golden rubbish cart and wheeled out of sight.

Written and directed by Clare Duffy, “Money the Game Show” offers a brightly apocalyptic guide to the way of all lucre during the past couple of decades. It is presented in the guise of a quiz show, overseen by Queenie (Lucy Ellison) and Casino (Brian Ferguson), former hedge fund managers who have been forced to become performance artists.

We the audience are divided into teams and pitted against one other in a! television studio-like environment where the games include selling short, selling long and hedging your bets. We cheer and hoot as volunteers from each team transport coins from the pile to suitcases before a freshly inflated soap bubble bursts or participate in balloon-blowing races. In between, Queenie and Casino act out the story of their rise and rise and - darn, knew it couldn’t last - precipitous fall as investment bankers.

The British stage has inhabited this kind of territory frequently in recent years, most notably in “Enron,” Lucy Prebble’s bloated cautionary spectacle about American greed. “Money the Game Show” has the advantage of being short, clever and remarkably understandable, even for a financial illiterate like myself. It makes you, as a participant in its games, feel silly, sordid and finally scared. It also provides the most ingenious and sobering explanation I’ve come acros for the current fascination with zombies in our culture.

Johan Persson Simon Russell Beale in “Privates on Parade.”

A few days earlier, I had been to another frolicsome treatise on the collapse of an empire, this one with music-hall-style songs performed in drag by one of the leading classical actors of the British stage. The great Simon Russell Beale starred as the cross-dressing Acting Captain Terri Dennis in “Privates on Parade,” Peter Nichols’s 1977 play about a British military revue troupe in Singapore in the late 1940’s.

This production, which ended its limited run last weekend, was the opening offering of the starry first season of the Michael Grandage Company. (Up next: Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw in John Logan’s “Peter and Alice.”) The show united three of my favorite British theater talents: Mr. Beale, Mr. Grandage (who was until recently the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse) and Mr. Nichols (“Passion Play,” “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg”).

Yet somehow, as both the story of a young soldier’s sentimental education and a portrait of the decline of British imperialism, this “Privates” seemed blunter - and longer â€" than I remembered it. (I had last seen it at the Donmar in 2001, again directed by Mr. Grandage, with Roger Allam and the young James McAvoy, who has grown up to become a movie star and portray the title role of “Macbeth,” which I’ll be catching on Thursday.)

Mr. Beale seemed to be enjoying himself mightily and infectiously as a flaming, show-stopping officer. Yet for once I didn’t sense the intricate layers of pesonal history that he usually brings to a performance. I knew what Terri was but not so much where he came from, as I felt I did with Mr. Allam.

Still, Mr. Beale did so beautifully by the pastiche songs, with music by Denis King and Noel Coward-style patter lyrics by Mr. Nichols, that I wonder if he doesn’t have a real future in musicals.He was delightful as King Arthur in “Spamalot” when he replaced Tim Curry on Broadway, but here he brought a true soulfulness as well as the obligatory camp to numbers that had him dressing up as Marlene Dietrich and Carmen Miranda. In fishnet stockings, he was definitely a knock-out, though perhaps not in the usual sense of the term.