SERIOUS MONEY
Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money depicts a frenzied and pummeling world of buy and sell, “takeover mania,” and insider deals -with champagne, coke, sex, silk shirts from Jermyn Street, and all else that money can buy as a bonus. It’s a world of beneficial connections (“You say Henry where I say Kissinger”), willful amorality (“Promise what you have to, promise your ass”) and corruption (“Wheeling dealing is stealing”) at every level, where money is borrowed to pay colossal interest and shady dealings are given a cleaner name.
It’s a crazy world of greed, of competition gone mad with itself (“They may say I’m a bastard but they’ll never say I’ve lost.”) It’s a world of, well, sex, drugs, and capital, and Act One ends with these words, “Fuck yourself instead.” It is certainly as timely and relevant a play in 2010 as it was in 1987.
Eda Holmes’ energetic and rightly frantic production features breathtaking pacing, upbeat though occasionally muffled delivery of lines, briskly efficient scene changes that actually involve a repositioning of stage boxes, clever chorography as in the hunting scene, and a crazy atmosphere that, appropriately, sometimes drives one crazy to watch. Churchill’s rhymes sneak up subtly or come forth with waving arms (“Pull yourself together Daddy, What does it matter if Jake was a baddie?”) but always delight. I especially love the pairings of “creditor” with “predator” and “shitty” with “city.”
There are many dynamic yet concisely realized characterizations here that include Graeme Somerville, Ali Momen, Marla McLean, Steven Sutcliffe, and Helen Taylor. An added pleasure is to hear the classically-trained and precisely articulated resonance of Lorne’s Kennedy’s rich tones projected without seeming effort to every corner of the intimate Studio Theatre.
AGE OF AROUSAL
Set in Victorian London, Linda Griffiths’ Age of Arousal, with its easy-flowing but densely theatrical text, bursts with an enthusiastically female energy under Jackie Maxwell’s precise and alert direction. It is a time of female identity in crisis and self-image in transition and “women must come to terms with two things, loneliness and money.” Why? Because women are still married into “legal prostitution and still “put the shackles back upon their wrists.” Maxwell keeps the tension between sex and sexual politics admirably real throughout.
Contained, restrained and socially acceptable dialogue alternates with unspoken, lust-driven, sexually uninhibited thoughts, and to hilarious effect. It’s a device that seems spontaneous and unforced throughout. Several scenes are obviously tailor-made to entertain and the competition in which each woman displays her fainting technique is delightful, as is the ritual of reaction to Impressionist paintings.
Each characterization is full-blooded yet stylized, a tease of clues to implied human depths that leave us guessing. Kelli Fox and Sharry Flett do an uncliched maladroitness with expertise and both actresses follow Griffith’s lead in negotiating poignant subtleties as Virginia and Alice. It’s a treat to have Fox in a rich and evolving role that has rough-edged gentleness to it and a treat to have Flett pull out the physical stops yet remain centred as a woman bound but not yet rigid in restraints. They are funny and make us care about them.
As Mary, Donna Belleville displays a meaty air of authority while remaining vulnerable and resolved in her longings; her strength aches. As Monica, Zarrin Darnell-Martin is sexually ripe and ready, unstoppable and defiantly so, a well-done turn-on. The inherently regal Jenny Young is a tall and slender in her gliding elegance, but also funny in facial expressions that make well-defined, desperately polite pronouncements in close encounters of a sexual kind. This production does understated awkwardness brilliantly.
As the only male character Everard (get it?), Gray Powell maintains some enticing ambiguity about his character, although Griffiths argues convincingly that men in this age are “beings who need to be woken up.” For the most part, as you might guess, we are made aware that men’s intellectual processes are penis-rooted and that they constantly have “balls aching,” no matter what they say in the presence of the ladies.
This production is top notch entertainment, a celebration in the key of woman, which doesn’t back down in exploration of how women are trapped with the “very nature of our bodies.” It’s an especial joy to experience this collective female energy as distinctly individual lives, both human and theatrical, under the director’s dexterous hand. And who on the planet will disagree that “it’s a shame that sex matters are so untidy.”