STAGE
The Power Of Yes, Lyttelton Theatre
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
Political playwright David Hare dramatises his own exploration of the banking crisis with input from insiders, experts and observers.
REVIEW
Apparently, those boxes the ousted employees of Lehman Brothers carted across Reuters Plaza last year were full of Milky Ways and Mars Bars.
Not, as we had fondly imagined, folders packed with bonkers currency trade contracts or kneelers neatly embroidered with the Black Scholes formula for valuing stock options. The thing is, you see, the Lehman employees still had credit in the canteen when the curtain fell and, like all good bankers, they weren't leaving without their money's worth.
We learnt this from Masa Serdarevic, a 23-year-old banker and refugee from Sarajevo, as played by the delightful Jemima Rooper. She was one of David Hare's guides to that moment in history when the banks had a cardiac arrest, a grand idea died and we all became very much poorer.
Hare - played with unassuming curiosity by Anthony Calf - announced from the start that this wasn't a play, although it was a story.
The re-enactment of his conversations with a variety of experts, onlookers and insiders about the intricacies of credit defaults swaps and sub-prime shenanighans should have had all the allure of a swine flu jab in Gaza but, strangely, cleverly and beguilingly, this half-documentary, half-lecture gained its own dramatic energy and impetus.
While many of the facts are well-known, there was a dramatic tension of sorts offered by the Emperor's New Clothes question. In the midst of all this bingeing and spending and profligacy and stupidity, why did no-one spot calamity?
The answer is they did. It was obvious. But everyone - bankers, politicians, speculators, economists - were too scared to jump off when there was still money to be made. They were hooked. Gordon Brown funded hospitals with the illusion. Bush fought a war. Buccaneers built empires on nothing but air and promises and no-one dared look down.
George Soros refuted Alan Greenspan's warning against "irrational exuberance" declaring that it was perfectly rational to make money when there was money to be made. It was all a matter of timing.
In Hare's version of history, villains emerge, clearly painted. Gordon Brown saw that the financial services provided 27 per cent of the tax take and stuck his moral compass in the bottom drawer.
He established a system where everyone - therefore no-one - was responsible for governing the system and then, when it all went south, stuffed billions of pounds of public money into the gaping wound while flailing around looking for someone to blame.
It was hailed as "a new kind of socialism. Socialism for the rich".
Fred the Shred did the deal because that's what he did and he saw no reason to apologise. Alan Greenspan inflated the market after 9/11 and left the world awash with cheap cash. The cautious old school bankers were abandoned by me-too investors who ran blindly to the false prophets hailed as geniuses even though it was market doing the work.
As a spectacle this was a collage of intersecting interviews and soundbites, assisted by neat staging and a screen illuminated with redolent images of the drama (queues outside Northern Rock etc).
In charge of this kaleidoscope was director Angus Jackson who gave room on the cavernous stage for each to say his or her piece before the next insight promptly arrived and was efficiently delivered.
The actors are proficient in their albeit limited roles. Jeff Rawle, Jonathan Coy, Richard Cordery, Peter Sullivan and Claire Price stand out in a vast cast that contributed to an uncomfortable dissection of where it all went wrong.
This was not a pantomime but the villains earned knowing, half-gulped groans from the tax-paying audience while the ugly sisters of greed and fear were given a good kicking.
Sadly, the only available hero in this tragedy was "Harry Hindsight" and a fat lot of bleedin' no good he turns out to be when the bill finally arrives.
