Written for Culture Wars
New writing is often – too often – content to filter a plot through a particular vocabulary, so that while the subject is prominent throughout, it’s exploration exists on a surface level. This technique is about threading connections through a play, combining ideas and spinning images. It is spider-diagram dramaturgy and while still yields brilliant plays – Duncan MacMillan’s Lungs being a good recent example – it involves a reluctance to really tear a topic apart and get down and dirty with its internal organs. If it kills, it does so through shrapnel wounds rather than direct hits, shotgun spray as opposed to sniper rifle.
The banking sector is certainly a legitimate target, but it needs more than dispatching by implication. To do so would be to conform to the simplistic scape-goating that daubs all bankers with the mark of the devil. Fortunately, Pierpan has not only done his homework and constructed a plot so steeped in its mechanics that simply tinkering and transplanting it elsewhere would be impossible. A pivotal section involves a loophole-exploiting scam – sorry, scheme – that is both ingenius and convincing in its cunning, Enron-like circularity. I couldn’t tell you whether it’s been directly imported from research, but if not, I almost worry that Pierpan might be putting ideas into the heads of hedge fund managers.
You Can Still Make a Killing is not Pierpan’s first look at the financial services industry. His 2010 monologue The Maddening Rain showed one man’s journey into and then out of it, revealing the addictive lure and heartless drive of the trading floor. Now he widens his scope, not only locating the individual within the industry, but slotting the whole sector into the wider world. He refuses to let us forget either the human story or the bigger picture.
Unlike his inscrutable, inscrupulous friend Jack, Edward Knowles didn’t make it out of Lehman alive. He was one of those that cleared a desk on that fateful Monday, before heading home with a head clouded by impending mortgage payments and school fees. Edward had banked on the bank. Ninety per cent of his net worth was in now worthless Lehman stock. Professional standing dictated he couldn’t sell it and so he had accumulated £3 million of debt against it.
Yet, this wasn’t simply headless gambling. It was an act of genuine (mis)calculated investment. So absolute was the faith in that system – the one that declared an end to boom-bust swings – that people didn’t just employ its principles for corporate profit, they forged the foundations of their own lives out of them.
In dire need of a job and at the behest of his wife, Edward spends his days sat in the Fulham Road Starbucks tuning into the gossipy titbits from financiers’ wives; in particular the Cath Kidston accent of Jack’s art-loving wife, Linda. However, no such luck sees him apply, tail between his legs, for a (less lucrative, more substantive) job at the FRA –basically the Financial Services Authority by another name.
At this point, Edward turns sheriff. Tim Delap’s stance widens and his hands rest authoritatively on his hips as sets about cleaning up the city. Eventually – inevitably – his investigations turn towards Jack (Ben Lee, who, by the way, does some of the best drunk acting you’re likely to see.)
The world Pierpan presents is one in which every social interaction is a negotiation. It is an ecosystem based on having something that someone else needs. That probably explains why the majority of Pierpan’s scenes – particularly in the first half – are one-on-one dialogues, to the point where convenient phone calls or nappy changes come just too often. He’s reliant on a one-up, one-down formula and yet each pulsates with drama, given the squirm of someone with one arm wrenched behind their back and the delicious proposition of the tables turning as the world whirs on.
What you realise, as even Edward claws his way back to the City proper, is that the financial crisis has not changed a thing. The Tories, who once heralded themselves as the party “to bring law and order back to the financial markets,” have capitulated to the point of disbanding the FSA. (Two new organisations come into existence next April.) But it’s more than this; increased competition for jobs, a twitchier financial climate and the ruthlessness that’s content to resort to human resources sacrifice have left the banking sector looking more cutthroat and exploitative, not less. There are no halos here. You can, of course, still make a killing.
Indeed, in a capitalist system that makes growth its only goal, you must. This is where Pierpan works the threading technique into the mix; to show a world where stagnancy and stability is death. The only way is up. Things can only get better. Or, as the hedge fund boss finally puts it: “To infinity and beyond.” It’s everywhere: in the competition between wives to get three, rather than two, kids round the table; in Edward’s determination that his children get the private education that he himself missed out on in order to get ahead; in the cultural capital of Linda’s obscure artists and in the determination of her fellow donors to fund only the biggest-name artists – the Picassos and Rothkos – at the expense of interesting individuals. It’s telling too that with Edward working shorter hours at the FSA, and the family almost living within their means, their happiness peaks. It’s only the ceaseless itch for progress and growth that trips him back into the City.
Matthew Dunster’s production does everything the play requires of it, with some colourful, yet restrained, character acting throughout the ensemble. Despite the best efforts of producers Ben Rix and Mimi Poskitt, who have ensured a slick professionalism rarely found on the Fringe, one wonders what might have been achieved with the backing of a major subsidised theatre and the facilities that come as a result. Pierpan’s play is certainly good enough – and robust enough – to merit it.
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