On The Money

Self-confessed "meek, liberal" theatre producer Ric Watts is having a moment. He’s recalling the time that his company’s own show turned him into a hysterical, red-blooded stockholder, cheering on a ruthless hedge fund manager as they won piles of cash at the expense of an ill-fated rival.

“I found myself screaming: like yeeeeeaaaahhhrrr!,” he exclaims, his French bulldog, Beryl stirring from her cosy position on his lap, looking mildly perturbed. “The game does this really interesting thing to an audience, where it turns us all into a bunch of rabid capitalists. It’s quite incredible.”

He’s describing his reactions to Money: The Gameshow, a show for grown-ups that ran in London last year, which he worked on in his role as producer for Unlimited Theatre. Now Unlimited and writer-director Clare Duffy have re-imagined it as Play Dough; a show that shares its basic template with Money... but is intended for anyone over the age of seven. If turning children and their families into mini-Donald Trumps doesn’t sound like the most worthy aim for a high-quality kids’ theatre piece, Duffy at least is confident that she’s finally sharing her vision with the right audience.

“Money has a kind of invisible magic to it,” says Duffy, speaking on a video call from her flat in Tollcross, Edinburgh (Watts and Beryl join us from home in Manchester).  “Because when we use a pound coin in the street, we don’t really think about it but we just know that it’s valuable. We use it to buy goods and that’s it.” Being just outside of this largely unquestioned system, she says that children are better placed to understand its significance. “You can see it as a system, rather than just part of the oxygen that you breathe.”

Rewind to 2010, when Duffy conceived the original show as part of the Platform 18 award for new directors at the Arches Theatre in Glasgow. Her motivation was to “find the things that are so everyday, so everywhere, that we don’t really notice them.” The political climate of the start of ‘austerity government’ and her limited budget of £5,000 helped to suggest the subject of cash.

In a neat marriage of grand concept and real-world pragmatism, she decided to use the entirety of that £5,000 in pound coins on stage, along with two actors who played hedge fund managers, asking the adult audience to help them play ludicrous high-stakes games with the cash in a satirical swipe at the world of high finance.

The approach was almost scarily effective. “It’s amazing how quickly five grand stops feeling like five grand,” Duffy says. “At first you look at it and think ‘Wow…’ and then you just go, ‘let’s chuck it around the stage, like it’s nothing.”

Excited by the concept, Ric Watts helped to expand the show with a bigger budget of £10,000, in a co-production between Unlimited (of which Duffy is a co-founder) and the Bush Theatre in London last year. The production values were slightly higher and got the show visually closer to the “flashy gameshow” concept, says Watts, though still within a budget: “it turns out that one moving stage light costs more per week than an actor gets paid.”

The security arrangements for the money, which involved Watts working extensively with G4S and having a security guard on stage at all times when the money is present, only served to heighten the moment when the money on stage seems to lose all meaning.

Despite excellent audience feedback and positive reviews, Duffy came away from the project feeling that “there was a better audience out there” for the play. “I was still thinking: this isn’t really going to change anything,” she explains. “Because once you’ve got a job, or any sort of debt, or any sort of dependency on the financial situation that we have, it’s really difficult to imagine it being any other way. And the only people that don’t have that are children.”

While getting seven-to-twelve year-olds to understand mechanisms such as long and short trading doesn’t sound like the easiest task, Duffy had already found from her work on Money… that the concepts are not as knotty as is often assumed.

“It’s not by accident that it’s wrapped up in arcane language, the world of finance and economics,” she contends. “But actually, what they’re doing can be equated to pumping up a balloon as quickly as you possibly can in 30 seconds,” an act that any self-respecting child with an appetite for mild anarchy can understand.

This may sound facile to some, but Duffy says with some relief that it was backed up by “all of the bankers and stock exchange managers who came to see the [original] show. Which was great, because it would have been awful if we hadn’t got it right.”

In the case of Play Dough, the trading world is made more accessible to a young audience through two new characters: young cousins from different sides of the economic tracks, who find themselves thrown into the high-stakes trading game by their new economic circumstances and a fluke result of actions in their past.

As well as giving children a way into the show, the characters reflect some of the hardships suffered by the young under ‘austerity’ government: Duffy and Watts mention family poverty and dependence on food banks, the closure of Sure Start centres and "the highest youth unemployment ever," all flowing originally from the behaviour at the top of the system that the play attempts to portray.

As Watts demonstrates with his dog-bothering excitement, the ‘game’ element of the show means that the message is delivered in about as fun a way as possible. “There’s so many variables that I can watch it night after night and get utterly hooked,” says Watts, more and more of whose work with Unlimited has included ‘interactive’ elements over the last few years.

But Watts says he’s “never been interested in something that is pure game,” and that engagement with story and character are key to the success of the play. Duffy agrees, saying that in pre-rehearsal workshops with children, she found them “absolutely hungry for story and hungry for character.” Far from being a gimmicky distraction from the narrative, the idea is that kids “have an embodied experience as the story is being told, of what the story is about.”

Play Dough promises to be a fun hour, but ultimately Duffy is very clear that its aims are deeply political: “If we tell a child before they’re ten: ‘this is how money works, that we create it together, and make up the rules of how it works,’” she says, “then we can say: ‘well, if that’s true, then you are  powerful enough to change those rules.’ So, if you could, what would you change?”