Concrete Playground

Now this is what school should have been like. Once a fanciful adolescent who would have preferred to lick chalk off the blackboard than sit through economics lectures, I learnt more about the Western financial system in just under two hours from this neatly executed play than I did from years of the BBC news, lectures from dad and dating bankers. This is a play that’s not really a play at all, but rather an instructive dialogue between characters based on prominent financial figures, written in 2009 as a response to the GFC for the benefit and greater understanding of the audience.

In The Power of Yes, myself and others like me (folks whose understanding of finance extends as far as remembering a PIN), are represented on stage by a character based on the playwright himself, David Hare. Drawing on countless interviews with the big wigs of the finance world, The Power of Yes is Hare’s attempt at aiding us all in nutting out our fatally flawed, smoke-and-mirrors monetary system and how the economic landslide of 2008 came to pass.

The stage, replete with hundreds of metaphoric deflated balloons, acts as an arena for each suited player to put forward their piece of the puzzle. Dating back to the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Myron Scholes in 1973 up to the recent dodgy undertakings of Bernie Madoff, Hare’s characters peel through the layers of convoluted jargon to expose a system built on delusion and riddled with corruption, greed and downright stupidity.

If, like me, your knowledge of the making of the GFC is limited, the language may prove a little inaccessible, the jargon too thick and fast for the layman. But the compelling performances by these seasoned, stylish actors and fluid and precise directorial choices by award-winning director Sam Strong render the convoluted material a little more digestible. Aptly described by Strong as “both timely and timeless — a work of instant history that reveals Masters of the Universe to be all too human”, The Power of Yes certainly answers a few questions but may leave you with a few more — like why, when the hyperreality of the finance world became grossly overblown and everything looked a little too good to be true, did no one cry “stinking fish”?