The Jungle: London’s Best New Play Will and Should Break Your Heartby Randi / October 4, 2018
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is ‘Company’ in the West End, playing at the Gielgud Theatre until (at least) December 22.
Not to sound too much like Stefan, but London’s hottest show right now is ‘Company’. It’s got everything: gorgeous sets, impeccable lighting, that IKEA chair everyone has that looks expensive, Patti LuPone, red dresses, untz-untz-untz music, a guy sitting next to you (me) burping up cheese (I almost vomited in front of Patti LuPone), and, most notably, a gender-switched lead character. In this modern revival of Stephen Sondheim’s classic 1970 musical, Bobby, the 35-year-old bachelor who enjoys juggling women and being the envy of his married friends, is now Bobbie, a 35-year-old bachelorette who dates and has lots of married friends and is thinking a bit about what she wants out of life. The buzz around this revival is off the charts, and yet the show itself lacks any sense of life driving it forward.
While ‘Company’ wants us to believe that Bobbie’s having some sort of existential crisis about being single at this age, Bobbie doesn’t seem to be in much need to change her life, because this is now 2018 and it’s not a big deal that a 35-year-old woman, especially in NYC, is single. She seems fine. She dates cute guys, she wears cute dresses, she has a bunch of friends who care enough about her to always invite her over and call her and throw her birthday parties. Who has friends that throw birthday parties anymore?! Her life rocks. So while a female lead is interesting and buzzworthy, the show’s whole main concept now fails as a piece of modern theatre, because the whole ‘erma gerd a 35-year-old person in 2018 is unmarried alert the church elders’ subject matter is so outdated and irrelevant to our lives that despite the truly gorgeous visuals of this production, and the mostly great performances, you’re left thinking, ‘wait but why though?’
Maybe it’s because I am in Bobbie’s demographic, so I have lots of Bobbie-friends in my life who are Living Their Best Life, but I think I found the female characterization of Bobbie less compelling than the male. Stereotypically, women think about marriage and getting to spinster age more than men do, right? Older single men are more socially acceptable than older single women, because yay misogyny. So if this is true, a female Bobbie isn’t anything of note. It’s merely a woman who still has her entire life ahead of her thinking, hmm maybe do want to get married someday. COOL. That’s not exactly the most compelling dramaz. Whereas, with a male Bobby, especially when he’s played with a little coldness towards his romantic conquests, it feels a little more moving to watch him realize that maybe he wants to settle down one day, because it wasn’t expected, and he’s not expected to really care about that. Bobby having an emotional journey is more compelling than Bobbie, well, just staying the same.
And maybe I found the female Bobbie less compelling because it wasn’t acted well. Unfortunately, I saw this show on the night when the lead, Rosalie Craig, was sick, and Jennifer Saayeng, who usually plays Jenny, was on as Bobbie. Saayeng should be commended for getting through the show without any mistakes, but this is a West End professional production, and her performance was sadly not up to standards. She seemed unable to control her breath, which resulted in weak voice, unable to be sustained. It was a shame that Bobbie’s big musical moments – “Marry Me A Little”, “Someone is Waiting”, and of course “Being Alive” – were laborious, tedious, awkward moments that you yearned to be over instead of relishing. It was a big disappointment, and I’m shocked that a production of this caliber doesn’t have a better suited standby for Bobbie. Her acting portrayal left me cold as well, so perhaps Craig does show Bobbie as going on an emotional journey, but Saayeng did not. It’s the fault of the director, Marianne Elliot, for not ensuring that that necessary journey always remains a part of the show no matter who is playing the role, and it’s the fault of the producers for not having a standby or understudy ready to portray it. When I last saw ‘Company’ live, it was the 2006 Broadway revival with Raul Esparza, and his Bobby was one of the most incredible performances I’ve ever seen in my entire life. People say that Bobby/Bobbie doesn’t require a powerhouse vocalist, but hell if hearing Raul blow the roof off the theatre with his definitive ‘Being Alive’ didn’t transform the entire emotional message of that song and subsequently the play as a whole. He actually felt the pressure from his married friends and was grappling with his own desires, whereas in this production, I didn’t notice anyone making Bobbie feel uncomfortable with her status at all. And for good reason – like I said, she seemed to be doing fine. But the whole point of a musical is to show emotion through song, which Bobbie did not do.
Aside from Bobbie, the rest of the characters were mostly great. ‘Company’ is told through a series of vignettes in no apparent chronological order, with returns to Bobbie’s surprise 35th birthday party scattered in here and there and as bookends. The first of Bobbie’s married friends were wonderful – Mel Giedroyc and Gavin Spokes as Sarah and Harry, who are trying to give up their vices and end up fully fighting each other while ‘demonstrating’ jujitsu, which Giedroyc hilariously pronounces like Ross Gellar says ‘karate’. Some of my favorite comic timing in ‘Company’ comes when Joanne enters the fray and sings to the audience “The Little Things You Do Together”, and Patti did exactly what was needed here, hysterically. The scene, which ends with the lovely-sad “Sorry-Grateful”, was as pitch-perfect as the set design was. Jenny and David, the couple who smokes weed with Bobbie and has some truly provocative dialogue, were also great. Jamie Pruden was on as Jenny with Saayeng swung up to Bobbie, and I honestly couldn’t believe that she wasn’t the regular Jenny. She and her husband, played by an affable Richard Henders, seemed perfectly suited to their parts. Lastly, Daisy Maywood and Ashley Campbell as Susan and Peter were great as well, with their interesting portrayal of a couple that is finally happy with each other once they get divorced.
But no one and nothing in the shows beats Bobbie’s gay friends Jamie and Paul. Jonathan Bailey stops the show and steals it with his incredible “Getting Married Today”, which is honestly the best reason to see this show. This is the one gender switch in the production that makes much more sense now. When a woman sings this song, it’s funny but just normal cold feet. With a man singing it, his jab of “Just because we can get married doesn’t mean we should” takes on a much more potent meaning, and his joke about being pregnant is actually funny. The staging is just as good as his performance, down to his leap onto the kitchen counter and the choirgirl disappearing into the fridge. It’s a tour de force and I will bet right now that Bailey wins an Olivier this year for it.
While Richard Fleeshman’s Andy, the idiot flight attendant formerly known as Amy, is fantastic, the other two boyfriends don’t fare as well. Theo (formerly Kathy) barely makes a dent, while PJ (formerly Marta) is so poorly redone as to be kind of maddening. Before, Marta was this cool liberal girl who revels in the city’s diverse wonders, but PJ seems to be just like some skanky Brit who spends all his time doing drugs in clubs. What this production does to “Another Hundred People” is a crime.
And Patti, while always great, didn’t really connect to the character. Maybe it’s because she doesn’t have to – the audience, screaming and cheering for her every single word, no matter what it was, would apparently scream and cheer for her if she said eat my farts instead of her lines. Joanne’s big song “Ladies who Lunch” is set in a modern club with house music thumping, which as you know is my nightmare, and there’s just no way this old lady would be at this club with all these young people dancing. The new book scenes given to Joanne before and after her big song are honestly weird. Whatever they were trying to accomplish by shocking Bobbie with Joanne’s untoward suggestions about sleeping with her husband &c. was not achieved. Instead, you’re left just kind of giving the stage the side-stink-eye like that gif of the little blonde toddler. If I am forced to give it some weight, I guess Joanne was trying to scandalize Bobbie into feeling something at all, and betting that her reaction would be the realization that she wants to settle down, but it felt unnatural and actually bizarre.
Sondheim has said that he hates hearing theories that Bobby was a gay man, because that’s an entirely different issue that the character would be dealing with. Bobby’s story is that of the quintessential straight white man with no real problems, and this is the one case I can think of where the story is best suited to that kind of man. Making him a woman diminishes the potency of his story the same way Sondheim feared making him gay would. And Bobbie doesn’t seem to have a problem here at all. Her friends don’t seem to be pressuring her to settle down as they seem to have in past productions. And you’d think that the gender-switch would bring along a new kind of pressure from the friends and from Bobbie’s own acknowledgement of her aging – the time she has left to have babies. I assumed this production would be all over that with a female Bobbie. But this obvious issue is left strangely unmentioned, the one thing that actually would make a compelling argument for a female lead. So, instead of the story of a cold, insular, lonely man who realizes how badly he wants someone to love him, we see the story of a middle class, mid-30s woman who has lots of friends, a great apartment, an active romantic life, and a birthday cake all to herself. I don’t see a problem.
INFORMATION
‘Company’ is playing at the Gielgud Theatre until December 22, but I am positive that either an extension or a Broadway transfer is coming, given the hugely positive reception it’s getting. Rush tickets are available on TodayTix.
Related Posts
LIES at the Almeida: Like ‘The Big Short’ But I’m Christian Bale
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today we are talking about Ontroerend Goed’s interactive theatrical play LIES, which played London’s Almeida Theatre this summer.
Capitalism is the devil, right? Down with capitalism? And down with big too-big-to-fail banks and fake money scams that don’t make any sense but that our entire global economy depends on, right? Yes, right, unless you’re the one making that money. Then your clear moral vision gets a little cloudy and it gets harder to say ‘no stop all of these terrible things that are destroying the world!’ because you’re too busy making like Mona Lisa Saperstein and saying “MONEY, PLEEEEEASE”. At least this is the moral of the story at LIES, the interactive theatre experience that ran at London’s Almeida Theatre until last Saturday (sorriessss all that cash has destroyed my ability to care that y’all missed it).
You can’t really call it a play, but LIES (which is stylized with currency symbols as you can see in the photo but I can’t really do on my computer without taking a few minutes of effort, which I don’t want to do anymore because again moneycashdontcare) is a powerful, intense, truly immersive theatrical event like nothing has ever been immersive before. The latest work from Belgian theatre collective Ontroerend Goed (and no I don’t know how to pronounce that but I’m going to say it’s…phonetically?) to play in London, LIES attempts to show how volatile the financial world is, yes, but also how artificial it all is. Alexander Devriendt, the artistic director of the OG collective (it’s just easier), explains in his programme note that his journey into the financial world revealed endless ‘magic tricks’, an entire global system of functioning that relies on absolutely nothing of substance. It’s all pixels on screens, he said, all the money we use and trade and owe, and nothing refers to anything real like the pile of gold of the past or something. Devriendt cites a philosopher who once said that “if everybody would know what money is, a revolution would break out.”
But even after 2008, and movies like “The Big Short” explaining to us non-experts how forked up the system is, nothing happened, nothing changed. Why is that? LIES intends to show the audience how precarious the economy really is, and maybe to spark a revolution by getting us to understand how dangerous it is to leave the control and knowledge of the financial world to just a select few.
And it is indeed dangerous for only a few people to have control, as evidenced in the performance I attended by…my own actions. Man, did I get swept up in ‘earning’ money and out-pacing all my tablemates in my returns. Let’s get down to the details. One by one, the audience members were taken into the dark room and sent to one of 10 blackjack-type tables, each with one cast member sitting in the dealer’s position. I’ll refer to them as dealers even though we weren’t playing cards. Unless you are disabled and need to remain with your companion, you don’t sit with the people you came with. I was upset at first that I couldn’t sit with Husbo, but now I totally understand how important it is to be anonymous to the people you’re with, with the freedom to act as depraved as you can.
Our table of six players was a country with our name taken from the first person who was seated at our table. The cast named the tables/nations quickly and impressively, with names like ‘Josovo’ (hilarious!), ‘United Andrew’, and ‘Markocco’. Each table/nation had six players, and each of us was to act as banks, with the dealer acting as the national government/central bank. (Can you tell already that I don’t know how economy do?) So, yeah, when I say this theatre was interactive, I mean it was forking interactive. This would be an absolute nightmare for those of you who hate when you’re in a regular theatre and an actor makes eye contact with you. You are part of this.
The only lights came from bald fluorescent bulbs hanging over each table, so that when you were at your table it felt like you were being interrogated. They also played weird music that made my blood pressure rise, and every so often they would announce how much money the international community earned – and how much the temperature in the room had increased. Creepily, every announcement the Dealer made would be stated in unison with all the other tables’ dealers. When you heard their unison chanting over the din of the room, it was kind of horrifying.
To begin, our dealer man told us to take out all the cash we had on us. I didn’t have my wallet, but luckily we were told by front of house staff to have at least a note or a pound on us, so I had a 5 pound note from Husbo. The dealer told us we could choose to invest up to 20 pounds, so everyone else at my table gave in that maximum, except me, with my fiver. We put our investments in envelopes (so everyone gets back their real money at the end) and we got back chips representing our investments, but in millions. My little baby stack of 5 chips was so baby! The dealer gave each of us a dice and said that the first opportunity for growth was on a deal that paid out at a 1:1 rate, meaning if you risked $1 million and succeeded, you got another $1 million back. To succeed, you had to roll 3, 4, 5, or 6. So the odds were in your favor, and we rolled about 4-5 times. There were only a few losses when you had such good odds of a successful roll.
After a few successful rounds of investment, Dealerman said that the central bank was booming, and our nation could start selling, and we could start buying, government bonds. Okay, I saw at this point that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just ‘rolling dice and doubling your ante’. Dealerman offered me a $10 million loan from the central bank, and I said yes but I don’t think I had a choice (they have to keep the game going and I needed to be competitive). I bought a few bonds as we were told that the value of these would only increase, as long as our central bank stayed healthy.
Next, Dealerman told us that we were doing well as a nation and we could now make investments at a 2:5 return. Meaning, you risked 2 chips but if you rolled 4, 5, or 6, you would win 5 chips. So, higher stakes for losing, and fewer winning rolls, but better returns. I did pretty well rolling high numbers (take me to Vegas! No just kidding I hate it there!) and you could no longer tell that I started at such a deficit compared to my tablemates – but that’s also because the Dealer was giving everyone loans like whoa. To mark your loans, he’d give you 10 chips, and then in the central bank he would put a blank card and write $10 million and your name. These debts became crucial to our central bank’s solvency.
Soon, the cast members from the other tables/nations came around to sell their bonds on the international market, which our Dealer went off to do too. On a board in the middle of the dark room was a list with all our country names and our current credit rating, from A to C. We were at a B, which is fine, but there were already nations with B+ ratings and A-, and even one A. We needed to improve our rating, whatever the heck that means! We started betting even faster and buying lots of bonds. I think. It’s all a money-grabbing blur.
Then things got interesting. Dealerman said that one of our banks could have the opportunity to short deals in order to hedge its losses. This was represented by a Short card, and we had to bid on it to win it. This is where I thought, ‘oh bloody oh, me and my inability to retain financial information.’ See, I’ve seen ‘The Big Short’, several times actually, and every time I understand completely what’s happening, but the second it ends, I forget all the lessons I learned. So I didn’t immediately realize how baller this card would be and how I’d be the ultimate winner. Shorting is like betting against the success of a deal, so that if a bank invests in something but the deal fails, you win. So if one of my tablemates bet on the 2:5 deal but lost, I’d win what they risked if I shorted the deal. I mean I think that’s how it works; don’t quote me. One of my tablemates got it for $12 million. That would have wiped out nearly all my money, so I was too nervous and too unsure of what it would get me. But a few rounds later, the Dealer had one more, a final Short card, for sale. I was going to get this no matter what, and you know what, I did – I paid $21 million for it. And it was worth it. I immediately started doing what the other guy with the Short card at my table was doing – shorting his own investments. Meaning, even when he lost/didn’t roll 5 or 6, he didn’t lose anything. We both started doing that on the 5:15 deals and we were positively swimming in chips like drunk Londoners on Saturday nights. It was SO MUCH FUN. Sure, shorting your own investments probably is illegal, but we were allowed to do it here, so we did. And it would have felt mean to use it on our new friends, like “oh you suck at rolling I bet that you are going to fail again.” That’s not how you make friends.
In the next round, we had the opportunity to make deals on a 5:15 rate of return, rolling only 5 or 6 to win. That’s a huge risk, and it’s so hard to roll just 5 or 6, but it didn’t matter for me with the Short card! I literally could never lose. It got almost impossible for me to count all my returns at the end of every round. One time, I did mess up when counting the returns – I put some of them in my capital pile. It was all just too much to keep track of! But that was tax evasion, and so I had to play a round with red dice! How embarrassing.
Even more fun, Dealerman then said we had the opportunity for two mergers to happen in our nation. The animalistic drive of capitalism had already gotten to us, so my buddy with the other Short card and I merged our banks. We would be unstoppable, and, as the Dealer told us, we were now too big to fail, for the sake of our nation’s economic health. We played, I mean invested, more 5:15 rounds, bought and sold more bonds on the national and international markets, and soon I couldn’t even count my returns at the end of every round (to pay my share of taxes to the central bank) without the Dealer’s assistance.
And everything the Dealer paid out from central was getting more and more unwieldy – my return of $15 million each winning roll was decreasing rapidly in the number of chips it had versus cards: it started with 15 chips, but then it was 10 chips and 5 bond cards (a mix of ours and other nations’), then it was 5 chips and 10 cards – both of bonds and debt holdings from other players. We reached a point by the end where I was getting maybe 1-2 chips and the rest was different kinds of cards to keep track of, awkward ‘financial products’ that mixed cash, national bonds, international bonds, and debt cards from all my fellow players. And this is where the truth kind of started to kick in – what was this money we were making? So much of it these cards that kind of represented money out of thin air, with nothing of substance backing it up. Sure I could try to make some of the players pay their debt cards off with actual chips, but it would still count exactly the same for me. And if you tried to pay off your debt with the central bank, it would hurt it, and possibly affect our rating. One of my tablemates wanted to pay off some of his debt with the central bank once he made a lot of money, and Dealer said he could – but to think about it, because having that debt helped shore up our government’s economy and losing it could hurt our nation. Obviously he didn’t pay it off, and we all kind of realized how so much of the economy is based on literally nothing, all houses made of playing cards, which was a little on the nose here.
But red alert! Four of the 10 nations in the room were crashing! They were all in dire need of a bailout, but the international community was told we could only save one of them, leaving the other three to crash. It would be decided by a vote, so each table voted on the one whose products they had the most of – like if we bought more bonds of one of those countries than others, we were voting to save them, because otherwise their products would be worthless. So one of them was saved, and whatever we had from the other three was indeed worthless.
We started getting a little more nervous about what was going on with the international community – but we were also rolling in dough and winning each roll was addictive. I am hundo p a democratic socialist – I think rich people should pay a whole lot more in taxes for the good of everyone and I don’t think billionaires should exist – but in this environment, I was a RAGING CAPITALIST. It was insane, how focused everyone remained on making money and how we didn’t really stop to think about whether the weird financial products we were creating as time went on were really worth any actual money, or whether they should be. By the time they stopped us, I had earned $130 million! And I started with 5 pounds! Man alive for an instant I was like ‘I’M GONNA BE A TRADER! I MEAN A GAMBLER! I MEAN I DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!’ But then I came back to my senses and was like, oh this is troubling, and man alive the world economy desperately needs to change.
Good game, Ontario Reverend Goatherd, good game.
INFORMATION
The show ran a straight two hours of intense concentration and really high blood pressure. They let you bring in water bottles but nothing that could spill (and nothing could be kept on the table). If you’re me, you needed ice cream afterwards, but others will need a hard drink – which explains why every banker is addicted to drugs.
But even after 2008, and movies like “The Big Short” explaining to us non-experts how forked up the system is, nothing happened, nothing changed. Why is that? LIES intends to show the audience how precarious the economy really is, and maybe to spark a revolution by getting us to understand how dangerous it is to leave the control and knowledge of the financial world to just a select few.
And it is indeed dangerous for only a few people to have control, as evidenced in the performance I attended by…my own actions. Man, did I get swept up in ‘earning’ money and out-pacing all my tablemates in my returns. Let’s get down to the details. One by one, the audience members were taken into the dark room and sent to one of 10 blackjack-type tables, each with one cast member sitting in the dealer’s position. I’ll refer to them as dealers even though we weren’t playing cards. Unless you are disabled and need to remain with your companion, you don’t sit with the people you came with. I was upset at first that I couldn’t sit with Husbo, but now I totally understand how important it is to be anonymous to the people you’re with, with the freedom to act as depraved as you can.
Our table of six players was a country with our name taken from the first person who was seated at our table. The cast named the tables/nations quickly and impressively, with names like ‘Josovo’ (hilarious!), ‘United Andrew’, and ‘Markocco’. Each table/nation had six players, and each of us was to act as banks, with the dealer acting as the national government/central bank. (Can you tell already that I don’t know how economy do?) So, yeah, when I say this theatre was interactive, I mean it was forking interactive. This would be an absolute nightmare for those of you who hate when you’re in a regular theatre and an actor makes eye contact with you. You are part of this.
The only lights came from bald fluorescent bulbs hanging over each table, so that when you were at your table it felt like you were being interrogated. They also played weird music that made my blood pressure rise, and every so often they would announce how much money the international community earned – and how much the temperature in the room had increased. Creepily, every announcement the Dealer made would be stated in unison with all the other tables’ dealers. When you heard their unison chanting over the din of the room, it was kind of horrifying.
To begin, our dealer man told us to take out all the cash we had on us. I didn’t have my wallet, but luckily we were told by front of house staff to have at least a note or a pound on us, so I had a 5 pound note from Husbo. The dealer told us we could choose to invest up to 20 pounds, so everyone else at my table gave in that maximum, except me, with my fiver. We put our investments in envelopes (so everyone gets back their real money at the end) and we got back chips representing our investments, but in millions. My little baby stack of 5 chips was so baby! The dealer gave each of us a dice and said that the first opportunity for growth was on a deal that paid out at a 1:1 rate, meaning if you risked $1 million and succeeded, you got another $1 million back. To succeed, you had to roll 3, 4, 5, or 6. So the odds were in your favor, and we rolled about 4-5 times. There were only a few losses when you had such good odds of a successful roll.
After a few successful rounds of investment, Dealerman said that the central bank was booming, and our nation could start selling, and we could start buying, government bonds. Okay, I saw at this point that it wasn’t going to be as simple as just ‘rolling dice and doubling your ante’. Dealerman offered me a $10 million loan from the central bank, and I said yes but I don’t think I had a choice (they have to keep the game going and I needed to be competitive). I bought a few bonds as we were told that the value of these would only increase, as long as our central bank stayed healthy.
Next, Dealerman told us that we were doing well as a nation and we could now make investments at a 2:5 return. Meaning, you risked 2 chips but if you rolled 4, 5, or 6, you would win 5 chips. So, higher stakes for losing, and fewer winning rolls, but better returns. I did pretty well rolling high numbers (take me to Vegas! No just kidding I hate it there!) and you could no longer tell that I started at such a deficit compared to my tablemates – but that’s also because the Dealer was giving everyone loans like whoa. To mark your loans, he’d give you 10 chips, and then in the central bank he would put a blank card and write $10 million and your name. These debts became crucial to our central bank’s solvency.
Soon, the cast members from the other tables/nations came around to sell their bonds on the international market, which our Dealer went off to do too. On a board in the middle of the dark room was a list with all our country names and our current credit rating, from A to C. We were at a B, which is fine, but there were already nations with B+ ratings and A-, and even one A. We needed to improve our rating, whatever the heck that means! We started betting even faster and buying lots of bonds. I think. It’s all a money-grabbing blur.
Then things got interesting. Dealerman said that one of our banks could have the opportunity to short deals in order to hedge its losses. This was represented by a Short card, and we had to bid on it to win it. This is where I thought, ‘oh bloody oh, me and my inability to retain financial information.’ See, I’ve seen ‘The Big Short’, several times actually, and every time I understand completely what’s happening, but the second it ends, I forget all the lessons I learned. So I didn’t immediately realize how baller this card would be and how I’d be the ultimate winner. Shorting is like betting against the success of a deal, so that if a bank invests in something but the deal fails, you win. So if one of my tablemates bet on the 2:5 deal but lost, I’d win what they risked if I shorted the deal. I mean I think that’s how it works; don’t quote me. One of my tablemates got it for $12 million. That would have wiped out nearly all my money, so I was too nervous and too unsure of what it would get me. But a few rounds later, the Dealer had one more, a final Short card, for sale. I was going to get this no matter what, and you know what, I did – I paid $21 million for it. And it was worth it. I immediately started doing what the other guy with the Short card at my table was doing – shorting his own investments. Meaning, even when he lost/didn’t roll 5 or 6, he didn’t lose anything. We both started doing that on the 5:15 deals and we were positively swimming in chips like drunk Londoners on Saturday nights. It was SO MUCH FUN. Sure, shorting your own investments probably is illegal, but we were allowed to do it here, so we did. And it would have felt mean to use it on our new friends, like “oh you suck at rolling I bet that you are going to fail again.” That’s not how you make friends.
In the next round, we had the opportunity to make deals on a 5:15 rate of return, rolling only 5 or 6 to win. That’s a huge risk, and it’s so hard to roll just 5 or 6, but it didn’t matter for me with the Short card! I literally could never lose. It got almost impossible for me to count all my returns at the end of every round. One time, I did mess up when counting the returns – I put some of them in my capital pile. It was all just too much to keep track of! But that was tax evasion, and so I had to play a round with red dice! How embarrassing.
Even more fun, Dealerman then said we had the opportunity for two mergers to happen in our nation. The animalistic drive of capitalism had already gotten to us, so my buddy with the other Short card and I merged our banks. We would be unstoppable, and, as the Dealer told us, we were now too big to fail, for the sake of our nation’s economic health. We played, I mean invested, more 5:15 rounds, bought and sold more bonds on the national and international markets, and soon I couldn’t even count my returns at the end of every round (to pay my share of taxes to the central bank) without the Dealer’s assistance.
And everything the Dealer paid out from central was getting more and more unwieldy – my return of $15 million each winning roll was decreasing rapidly in the number of chips it had versus cards: it started with 15 chips, but then it was 10 chips and 5 bond cards (a mix of ours and other nations’), then it was 5 chips and 10 cards – both of bonds and debt holdings from other players. We reached a point by the end where I was getting maybe 1-2 chips and the rest was different kinds of cards to keep track of, awkward ‘financial products’ that mixed cash, national bonds, international bonds, and debt cards from all my fellow players. And this is where the truth kind of started to kick in – what was this money we were making? So much of it these cards that kind of represented money out of thin air, with nothing of substance backing it up. Sure I could try to make some of the players pay their debt cards off with actual chips, but it would still count exactly the same for me. And if you tried to pay off your debt with the central bank, it would hurt it, and possibly affect our rating. One of my tablemates wanted to pay off some of his debt with the central bank once he made a lot of money, and Dealer said he could – but to think about it, because having that debt helped shore up our government’s economy and losing it could hurt our nation. Obviously he didn’t pay it off, and we all kind of realized how so much of the economy is based on literally nothing, all houses made of playing cards, which was a little on the nose here.
But red alert! Four of the 10 nations in the room were crashing! They were all in dire need of a bailout, but the international community was told we could only save one of them, leaving the other three to crash. It would be decided by a vote, so each table voted on the one whose products they had the most of – like if we bought more bonds of one of those countries than others, we were voting to save them, because otherwise their products would be worthless. So one of them was saved, and whatever we had from the other three was indeed worthless.
We started getting a little more nervous about what was going on with the international community – but we were also rolling in dough and winning each roll was addictive. I am hundo p a democratic socialist – I think rich people should pay a whole lot more in taxes for the good of everyone and I don’t think billionaires should exist – but in this environment, I was a RAGING CAPITALIST. It was insane, how focused everyone remained on making money and how we didn’t really stop to think about whether the weird financial products we were creating as time went on were really worth any actual money, or whether they should be. By the time they stopped us, I had earned $130 million! And I started with 5 pounds! Man alive for an instant I was like ‘I’M GONNA BE A TRADER! I MEAN A GAMBLER! I MEAN I DON’T KNOW WHAT I MEAN!’ But then I came back to my senses and was like, oh this is troubling, and man alive the world economy desperately needs to change.
Good game, Ontario Reverend Goatherd, good game.
INFORMATION
The show ran a straight two hours of intense concentration and really high blood pressure. They let you bring in water bottles but nothing that could spill (and nothing could be kept on the table). If you’re me, you needed ice cream afterwards, but others will need a hard drink – which explains why every banker is addicted to drugs.
Beckett’s Endgame at the Old Vic Successfully Captures the Yearning for the Sweet Release of Death
It’s Theatre Thursday! Today’s show is Endgame by Samuel Beckett, playing a double bill with his short piece Rough for Theatre II, now at the Old Vic if you like torture.
To sort something straight off the bat: this is NOT about the last Avengers movie (which, amazingly enough, I still have not seen. I really do not care anymore about those superheroes. It’s too much). Endgame is a famous play by Samuel Beckett, the playwright of ‘theatre of the absurd’, famed for his dreary, bleak look at the human existence. He did not seem happy. People say his work is ‘tragi-comic’ but I did not get the comic part. He famously said that nothing is funnier than unhappiness…which after seeing this production, I promise you is false: I was very unhappy, and very much not amused. I have never been so close to being sure that a piece of theatre was pranking me as I was during this evening at the Old Vic, nearly shouting “oh THIS is the bad place” despite the beloved talent onstage (Daniel Radcliffe and Alan Cumming). I’ve also never seen so many people walk out of a show, unable to wait till an interval or the end, and I’ve seen some shit.
Let’s start with Rough for Theatre II, since it’s a little nothing of a show. This production serves a double bill with Beckett’s little one-act that’s about two like, afterlife accountants but not in the brilliant Good Place way, who show up when someone is about to commit suicide and they go through his life and see whether he should or not? At least I think that’s what it’s about. It was odd and vague and incredibly short. Daniel Radcliffe gets to do a lot of box jumps which is fun for him but not for me when watching because I was like I wanna do box jumps instead of watch this. I honestly have to give Beckett props for naming it what it is.
Endgame, the main course, is one of the most unreasonable pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen. Remember how Alex Borstein did that episode of Friends where she had a one-woman show about why men don’t like her and talked about getting her first period, and Chandler made everyone go see it as punishment? I didn’t know Sammy Beckett but I feel like he really hated theatergoers. He’s the playwright equivalent of Lewis Black’s joke about how airplane seats in economy were created by a guy with scoliosis who is really f-ing pissed. This piece is about an invalid (Alan) and his servant (Daniel) and Alan is mean to Daniel and Daniel has a limp but Alan can’t walk or stand at all and they just are like, waiting for death? It’s considered a sort of sequel to Waiting for Godot and I guess they just replaced Godot with Death. Alan’s parents live in trashcans at the foot of the stage and sometimes they pop up and say nonsense things that are weird and not funny and he replies in ways that are absurd because I guess this is Theatre of the Absurd but just because it has an official title doesn’t make it worthwhile.
Daniel is fine, but there’s only so much you can do performance-wise with the material you are given, especially when most of your requirements are carrying a ladder to and fro and climbing up and shimmying down, over and over and over in an act that serves no purpose except to delight people who find delight in incongruous slapstick, a cheap laugh ploy that, of course, works because people love cheap laughs that don’t have anything to do with anything. Alan Cumming is fine, though overly hammy much of the time. But I don’t know what we can ask of them when they are forced to do this absolute nonsense show. Why, why is this considered a great piece of theatre? The only thing I can think of is, it’s about people waiting for the sweet release of death and when you watch it, it’s such torture that the audience feels the yearning for death along with the characters. Is that it, that the show so successfully makes the audience feel what the characters feel so that they too anticipate sweet release from the torment of this show? Is that what he was going for, because if so, man, well done Sammy, what a gottamn masterpiece of pain you’ve created. It’s a f-ing triumph. If he didn’t want us to feel that death was preferable to watching this show for much longer, then I, along with everyone who left, missed something.
INFORMATION
Rough for Theatre II was just under a half hour, which means your interval bathroom break comes when you don’t need it, adding to the whole torture vibe of the evening. Endgame is then an hour and half, which is the exact amount of time it’s safe to watch this show for before one loses one’s mind.
The Old Vic renovation is fine – there’s still not enough room in the lobby (what a mess) but the bathrooms in the basement (where you go if you sit in the stalls, so get an aisle towards the back if you need) are better and bigger. Also, they are not defined by gender, just by whether they contain stalls or urinals, which is how every bathroom should be since it’s great for everyone (except men who need to go #2) (hey that’s what Beckett is with this show!).
STAGE DOOR
Like all Danny Rad shows, people were SPRINTING to the stage door in droves, so I skipped out on adding ‘trampled by horrible crowds’ to the night’s list of agonies. (Also what was I gonna say to them, yeesh.)
