There is nothing more infuriating than public naval gazing by media
types. Julia Somerville once penned a double page spread entitled
‘How I Covered the Queen Mother’s Death’. Who cares? Who cares how
the news is made? News is not news. This being the case, I was
slightly dismayed to learn that David Hare’s play about the credit
crunch, The Power of Yes, in the Lyttleton at the National Theatre,
is actually a play about David Hare writing a play about the credit
crunch. See? You’re already a bit annoyed just by that last sentence
aren’t you?
To be fair to Hare, there aren’t many playwrights who could come up
with 105 straight minutes of very watchable drama on such
unappetising sounding topics as securitised credit derivatives.
Hare’s decision to chronicle his own researches actually works pretty
well. The author character acts as the audience’s representative: a
sort of donnish Everyman trying to get layman’s answers to questions
from a bewildering range of financial names (some household, some
withheld) who come and go on a black, sparsely furnished stage.
Some interesting anecdotes emerge: the boxes the Lehmann Bros
employees carried out into the street on meltdown day were filled,
not with files and fax machines, but with bottled water and chocolate
bars looted from their cashless canteen system: they had unused
credit.
David Hare entirely resists caricaturing ‘the bankers’ as moustache
twirling vaudeville villains and it is easy to share his fascination
and genuine affection for some of the city types he got to know (not
Fred Goodwin who gets excoriated) but there is no escaping his
conclusion: it could and it will happen again. You can’t learn your
lesson if you still don’t think you’ve done anything wrong.
Now then, pay attention and I’ll tell you how I wrote my review of
The Power of Yes…
