Turning a crisis into a drama

Rhian Nicholson
16.10.09 14:23

It is the six trillion dollar question. Just who is to blame for the financial crisis which brought banks to their knees, made investors reach for the Prozac and had ordinary people cutting holes in their mattress to store their cash?

Playwright David Hare makes a drama out of a crisis in his search for answers, interviewing dozens of the wise, the arrogant, the mighty and the greedy who all played a part in the great crash of capitalism.

The result is the Power of Yes, a bitingly humorous whirlwind trip through the cause and consequence of the financial crisis.

"This isn't a play. It's a story," the actor Anthony Calf playing Hare announces at the start. "It doesn't pretend to be a play. It pretends only to be a story." And what a story it has to tell.

A stream of business-suited actors stride across the almost bare stage, impersonating the investor philanthropist George Soros, FSA boss Lord Adair Turner and ex-chairman Howard Davies, Sir Ronald Cohen and a host of their business cronies from both sides of the Pond. A remarkable number went to Harvard Business School, it turns out.

A former god-like figure, Alan Greenspan's lower face appears on screen, waxing lyrical about the self-correcting power of free markets - a viewpoint he had to dramatically alter in the midst of the crisis.

Indeed, the arrogance of the financial world is on dazzling display: all the major players are almost as quick to offer up their esteemed opinions as they are to pass the buck in the blame game.

"Capitalism works when greed and fear are in the correct balance. This time they got out of balance. Too much greed, not enough fear," we're told.

The Nobel man

Rewind to Myron Scholes who came up with a 'foolproof' formula for eliminating risk which has become the standard in global financial markets. In 1997, he bagged himself a Nobel Prize before only a year later seeing his hedge fund go bust and getting arrested on tax evasion charges.

How the mighty can fall - indeed, if Bernie Madoff got a pound from each audience member every time his name was mentioned he might have enough to repay his victims.

Hare guides us through the boom years when the City accounted for 9% of the British economy and provided 27% of tax revenue. Little wonder the politicians were loath to introduce anything more than feather touch regulation and the newly created Financial Services Authority was more "neighbourhood police than CID".

Alas the fatal decision to start offering huge loans to people with no income or assets over in the US proved almost as stupid as the bank executives' failure to grasp the risks of those sub-prime debts being volleyed about the financial system.

"If you are paid �20 million a year you are not incentivised to look at your accounts," a character quips.

Suddenly the financial world hits meltdown and capitalism is stopped dead in its tracks for four days.

"It's like a ship which you're being told is in apple-pie order, the decks are cleaned, the metal is burnished, the only thing nobody mentions: it's being driven at full speed towards an iceberg," one character says with the beauty of hindsight.

The familiar image of stunned Lehman Brothers workers carrying boxes out of the office is magnified on the screen. But far from containing vital files, those boxes were apparently full of "sandwiches and Milky Ways" from the canteen bought on the credit still on their lunch cards.

Just no Good-win

Sadly, Hare did not get to interview everyone's favourite banker-bashing target Sir Fred Goodwin, but that doesn't stop the former Royal bank of Scotland boss from becoming a symbol of unrepentant greed, furious that the markets did not behave rationally rather than accepting he had any part to play in the bank's downfall.

At the time of its collapse, RBS had bigger assets than Britain's GDP thanks to Sir Fred's compulsive deal-making - culminating in the disastrous acquisition of ABN Amro in 2007.

His face is projected onto video screens in a parody of Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe prints and his love - or rather need to seal deals is compared to Warhol's "Sex is nostalgia for sex". It's not just about greed, but "the thing itself".

Hare never quite comes up with any answers - as anger, bafflement and disgust bubble to the surface - but he does suggest the financial crisis spelt death for the idea that markets are inherently wise and capable of sorting themselves out.

Instead we see rampant capitalism in all its folly replaced by a socialism designed to bail out the rich alone. "The people who end up paying the price are never the people who get the benefits," is the parting thought.

If money talks this may not quite be its confession but it's a sobering testimony against the pursuit of profit.

The Power of Yes is on at the National Theatre, London until 10 January.

Turning a crisis into a drama

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