You get a tougher take on Wall Street from the Wall Street Journal (or the Financial Times) than you do from Caryl Churchill’s “Serious Money,” the comedy in verse that opened at the Public Theater last Thursday for a five-week run. “Serious Money,” which comes to New York from the Royal Court Theater in London’s fashionable Sloane Square, takes a satiric look at the post-deregulation world of high finance and comes to such whopping great conclusions as that there is money in the world, that money is bad because it makes people greedy, and that insider trading is carried on by grasping, aggressive people without passion or proper feeling who don’t know what honor means. The action, which moves between London and New York (among other places), is largely set in and around the London International Financial Futures Exchange, LIFFE (pronounced “life”). The convoluted plot centers on a young corporate spy named Jake Todd (Scott Cherry), whose mysterious death seems to stem from a conspiracy to take over a company called Albion (get it?). When Jake is shot, near the beginning of the evening, his sister Scilla (Joanne Pearce), a LIFFE dealer, decides to investigate—not because she cares much but because she wants to find out where his money is. Possibly involved in Jake’s death are a banker named Zac Zackerman (Paul Moriarty), an arbitrageur named Marylou Baines (Linda Bassett), and a corporate raider named Billy Corman (Daniel Webb). We never do find out for sure whether or not Jake was murdered, but we are given to understand that if he was, he got bumped off by someone in the Tory government who, wanting “five more glorious years” of free enterprise, hoped to avoid scandal in an election year.
Most of the satire is lodged in the device of having the characters talk in rhyme, for doggerel tends to be naturally funny.
SCILLA: I had been wondering if you killed Jake, but now I hardly care.
It’s not going to bring him alive again, and the main thing’s to get my share.
They left me out because I’m a girl and it’s terribly unfair.
You were Jake’s main employer so tell me please
How did you pay him his enormous fees?
Did somebody pass a briefcase of notes at a station under a clock?
Or did you make over a whole lot of stock?
Did he have a company and what’s its name?
And how can I get in on the game?
You’ll need a replacement in London who knows their way round the businesses and banks.
Can I suggest somebody?
MARYLOU: No thanks.
British acting, like the French language, can make anything sound like poetry. The above is a pretty fair representation of Churchill’s verse—except that she isn’t always so fussy about rhyme scheme. The form, which moves around more than Churchill’s high-flying financiers, jets between couplets, quatrains, blank verse, and free verse. The rhymes are, for the most part, predictable (lazy/crazy) or a cheat (assistant/instant) and or heavily reliant on non sequiturs.
Rising above this material is a really superb cast, directed by Max Stafford-Clark and led by Miss Bassett, Miss Pearce, Mr. Cherry, and Allan Corduner, who plays the father of Jake and Scilla. Most of the actors play several parts, some of them American (Meera Syal is particularly charming as a Cockney floozy and as a Peruvian heiress given to saying Marie Antoinettish things with a great big smile.) In the best tradition of British cast-doubling, there has been an attempt to have actors play characters that differ as much as possible from one another. Unfortunately, though, Miss Churchill hasn’t given her cast a lot to work with: because she has created cartoons rather than characters, there isn’t much difference between Mr. Webb’s corporate raider and his gilts dealer, for instance, or between Mr. Corduner’s old Mr. Todd and his cabinet minister. Moreover, only Burt Caesar, who plays an American banker as well as a Third World mogul and Marylou’s personal assistant, manages a plausible Stateside accent.
“Serious Money” broke box-office records at the Royal Court, then moved to the West End where it is running still. It’s easy to see why it was such a big hit in London. The play combines the spectacle of actors misbehaving (using bad language, pulling down one another’s trousers, pretending to vomit or to be defecating horses) with a confirmation of many of the British intelligentsia’s most dearly held beliefs: chief among them, that money is somehow something that one is better of yearning for than having, and that while various hidden vices are permissible, open ambition is unpleasant and impolite. I don’t think American audiences are so likely to be snowed by Miss Churchill’s play. I think it will be pretty clear to everyone that the satire is rather tame and serves to glamorize rather than to ridicule the world of high finance, by making money look sexy and exciting—which, of course, it is. In fact, I think it will be pretty clear to most people that Caryl Churchill and the Royal Court Theater (and, by extension the Public Theater) are cashing in on eighties ethics and yuppie fashion. (Your average Wall Street whiz kid is far more likely to be amused than chastened by Jake’s cynical “Greed’s been good to me!”)
A number of aspects of the production seem to look wistfully back to a more gracious past. The evening begins with a snatch of Handel’s “Water Music” and a brief scene from Thomas Shadwell’s 1692 comedy “The Volunteers; or, The Stock Jobbers,” played before the curtain, at the end of which trumpets blare, the curtain opens to reveal Peter Hartwell’s technology-laden set (three clocks, eight computer terminals, forty-nine wall phones), and the actors march ceremoniously upstage. This all makes for quite beautiful and impressive theater, but it has little purpose other than to establish that high finance has been around for a long time and once had charm. The inept post-punk pop songs that end both acts, in which actors rhythmically shout jargon and obscenities at the audience, likewise seem to cast a cold eye on the ugly modern world. The most vivid and moving speech in the play is a description of what London’s financial district used to be like before deregulation:
The stock exchange was a village street.
You strolled about and met your friends.
Now we never seem to meet.
I don’t get asked much at weekends.
Everyone had a special name.
We really had a sense of humour.
And everybody played the game…
Nicknames, house parties, playing the game: the fact is that, for all the hipness and topicality of “Serious Money,” the whole play reeks of nostalgia. But that’s the irony of so much British left-wing theatre: it’s such a funny mixture of groping radicalism and pre-post-imperialist values. One sees this in Miss Churchill’s earlier work: “Cloud 9” and “Top Girls,” respectively, used elaborate cast-doubling and time-warp tricks to make the points that women have feelings and that that careerist feminism is not compatible with good socialist principles. These are ideas that could absorb only an audience of Brits lost in the ideological mists of time. Still, I’m glad that Joe Papp imported “Serious Money.” It’s salutary, I think, to see first-rate acting of a sort that the American stage tradition provides no basis for; also to learn how very little it takes to impress the British politically.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 14, 1987