2010: The Power of Yes by David Hare

The Power of Yes by David Hare. Company B Belvoir directed by Sam Strong. Belvoir St, Sydney, April 22 – May 30, 2010.

Reviewed April 27 by Frank McKone.

This play reminds me of George Bernard Shaw’s Heartbreak House. Shaw’s response to The Great War was to write a comedy about a tragedy. David Hare has done the same for the Global Financial Crisis.

At first I thought the device of the author himself being the central character could not be sustained. It seemed suspiciously too easy, and difficult to imagine how a storyline beginning in February 2007 with “United States subprime mortgages industry worth an estimated $US1.3 trillion collapses, with 25 subprime lending firms declaring bankruptcy” and concluding on 1 June 2009 with “General Motors, the world’s largest car-maker, declares bankruptcy” could possibly develop dramatically on the stage.

Shaw used fictional characters in a house full of sea-faring references as a metaphor for an England being changed forever by the sad lie that this was the War to End War. But Hare’s characters, including himself, are real. Shaw had to delay the production of Heartbreak House until after the end of the war, but Hare lets us know in no uncertain terms that the perfidy of the banks and the people paid so much to run them that they have no interest in checking their company accounts is a system of lies whose story still has a long way to go.

In fact, the drama in The Power of Yes is successful because as the character David Hare listens to a great array of financial system stake-holders, trying to understand such things as how the Royal Bank of Scotland could amass assets greater in value than the whole of the output of the British Isles, we identify with his wanting to know and with his terrifying suspicion that no-one really knows how the GFC happened, nor what to do about it. Though George Soros does get a guernsey.

For a theatre-going Sydney audience which I guess included many of the monied class, the laughter and the still moments of embarrassed reflection rang external and internal bells. We cannot wait till after the end of the war to see this play, because we may never know when the end has come.

On the night I attended, even events in the audience and off-stage proved that the unpredictable may happen at any time, exactly as demonstrated in the play. No Harvard Business School mathematical formula could have foretold that a woman would faint, creating a 20 minute break in the performance, just as building societies were being turned into banks which were destined to fail. Nor could anyone know that actor Rhys Muldoon’s mother would be hospitalised suddenly, so that he had to leave the stage before the final scenes. We hope for the best for both families.

The evening concluded with warm appreciation from the audience for the actors’ work, not only in so clearly performing a text horribly replete in the jargon of financial complexity, but for their professionalism in the face of unfortunate unavoidable interruptions. It was a great cast for a great play.

© Frank McKone, Canberra