Saturday March 30, 2024
The Power of Yes
Review

The Power of Yes

May 2 2010

THE POWER OF YES Company B at Belvoir St, 17 April-30 April, 2010; Image: Amber McMahon, Tony Llewellyn-Jones and David Whitney

DAVID HARE has been exploring verbatim theatre for a while now. Think The Permanent Way (classic verbatim) and Stuff Happens (verbatim plus), and now The Power of Yes; which might be described as creative verbatim. What was there is what you see is what you get – and then some.

The form makes for powerful storytelling and, as storytelling is essentially the genesis of theatre, in the hands of this writer and director Sam Strong, it also makes powerful theatre; albeit a different kind of theatre. As you probably know already, The Power of Yes is Hare’s attempt to understand the GFC – the Global Financial Crisis - and the minds of the men (mostly men) that caused it. For me, he succeeds spectacularly.

Turning on the TV to watch Lateline and Lateline Business – directly after coming in from Belvoir St – it’s apparent (and now wondrously comprehensible) that they are still causing it. (Goldman Sachs honchos before the US Senate Committee; the Greek economy in tatters – courtesy Goldman Sachs – etc etc.) Amazingly, thanks to Hare and his 110-minute delve into the economic tsunami that was unleashed on 8 August 2007, I actually understood what’s been going on, and why, for the first time – ever.

A cannily plausible Brian Lipson mooches the stage as the writer – Hare – listening, questioning, looking bemused, amazed and finally, angry. His journey pretty much mirrors that of most of us; including the Queen who, in the early depths of the UK crisis, asked one of her Treasury officials: “Why did nobody see it coming?” Good question – and one not asked or answered by any of the usual suspect economic pundits.

The Power of Yes

Around the writer the bespoke suits stride, declaim, explain, patronize, confide, justify, whine, boast and never once exhibit a moment’s unease, uncertainty, shame, embarrassment or guilt. They don’t get it – even now – as the pained surprise of real-life bankers proves. But they also believe we don’t get it: what they were up to, what they’ve wrought and that it’s all about to happen all over again within the next two years. And it’ll be even worse, if that’s imaginable.

Director Strong and set and costume designer Dale Ferguson have fashioned riveting theatre out of Recent World Economics 101 and Strong paints fascinating and animated pictures with his well chosen cast of (A-Z) John Derum, Jonathan Elsom, Russell Kiefel, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Amber McMahon, Rhys Muldoon, Luke Mullins, Marshall Napier, Graham Rouse, Christopher Stollery and David Whitney. Who knew there was so much variety, so many laughs, so much barbarity and so many sub-species in the higher echelons of global finance? And wouldn’t the authors of Communism be chuckling and twirling in their graves at the irony that the New World Order is actually the old one in reverse: socialism turns out to be for the very, very rich!

The Power of Yes is hugely entertaining, instructive and enraging. Can’t ask much more of theatre than that.

 

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