REVIEW: Roaring Trade, Park Theatre ✭✭✭

Roaring Trade

Park 200 Theatre

30/09/15

3 Stars

Steve Thompson’s Roaring Trade was well received at its premiere in 2009 at the Soho Theatre. It is revived now at Park 200 and the main question is how well a play that was highly topical then has aged six years on – is a new production merited? On this showing the verdict is mixed. We find ourselves in Canary Wharf on the open-plan bond-trading floor of one of largest commercial banks. Screens flicker and tick over remorselessly as a backdrop. Exits and entrances are available to the players at all four corners of the stage. There just four desks, which tells us that this is essentially a four-hander in which what will matter is the friendships and rivalry that develop between the players in work and at leisure. This is Glengarry Glen Ross territory with many of the same ethical choices at stake.

The four main characters are Donny (Nick Moran), ‘PJ’ (Michael McKell), ‘Spoon’ (Timothy George) and Jess (Lesley Harcourt). There are lesser roles for Donny’s son Sean (William Nye) and PJ’s wife Sandy (Melanie Gutteridge). Alan Cohen directs.

At the start of the action one of the tightly-knit trading team has left his desk, and we await the arrival of the newbie – Olly, shortly nicknamed ‘Spoon’, as in ‘silver-spoon’, in a reference to his privileged family and Cambridge up-bringing. Right from the start we are thrown into one of a series of conflicts based on class, gender, generational tensions, jealousies over remuneration, and sheer stress in working with the sums at stake that inveigle all of the characters and disfigure their behaviour to each other.

Donny is a mouthy barrow-boy made good who just has to be top-dog in every aspect of his life, but above all in the work-place where he has to be making more for the firm than anyone else and scoring the largest take-home bonus. Over the course of the play we find out how much or how little substance lies behind the bravado and braggadocio. ‘Spoon’ is the fresh-faced naïve Oxbridge graduate with a natural head for figures who is Donny’s main rival in the firm, and also turns out to be a lot more (and less) than he seems, as the play progresses. PJ, is the older guy, who is losing his grip on the job and taking to drink; and Jess – in many ways the most interesting and best drawn character - has to navigate the shoals of gender politics by out toughing the men at their own game while not losing touch with her own identity. It is a tale of the Square Mile where the atmosphere, to quote the author, is ‘a mix between Tom Brown’s Schooldays and Gladiator.’

There are essentially three narratives running alongside one another in this play. Firstly we have the story of PJ’s decline and fall, as long liquid lunches and failures of focus on the job result in his receiving a lower bonus than everyone else and he resigns in pique. McKell has some opportunities for some fine drunken acting, which are nicely observed in the sense that he does not exaggerate for effect alone: he portrays someone who is still functioning on the surface when clearly incapable of sensible action on any rational assessment. This is a recognisable City type even now.

Then there is the rivalry between Spoon and Donny to outscore and out-earn one another. This second story provides the narrative energy for the play as a whole and there more than enough - perhaps too many – twists and turns before it reaches a conclusion. Neither character has much appeal, despite the best efforts of the actors to add light and shade to their roles; and for this reason this central section of the play possesses only a limited interest confined to the mechanics of how one or the other might finally prevail. Apart from anything the antithesis between Oxbridge guile and East End chicanery is just too pat and stereotyped in caricature to carry conviction. The third narrative, which was essentially whether Jess succeeded in becoming an initiator or a victim in this cut-throat rivalry had much more interest and could have been developed further.

There are of course interesting issues to explore here and the best scenes in the play are those where the action takes a break from the hectic interchanges of the dealing floor and stands back to reflect on the ethics and inevitability of the action. There is a delightful scene between Donny and his son Sean set in a café in which the mechanics of bond-trading and ‘selling short’ are explained for the benefit of the audience. The child’s role is delightfully written as a way of asking the questions that need to be asked, and yet no one ever does…

There is also another still moment of discussion between Donny and PJ after the latter’s early retirement in which they both count the costs of their lifestyles and compare balance-sheets. Clearly PJ is much happier to have got out when he could whatever anguish this may have cost him from his high-maintenance wife. This is a young man’s gambler’s game, and the key to success is knowing when to quit while ahead.

The really deep questions though remain unasked. This is the missed chance in this revival, now we are several years beyond the Great Financial Crisis. If we need bond trading and the futures market, does it have to be pursued like this? Is the unedifying behaviour and loss of trust and human decency a comment on the character of the risk-takers and chancers who are attracted to this world, or to the nature of the work itself? If, as Donny says, ‘Trouble is opportunity…trouble gets you places,’ then is the cost in both human and macroeconomic risk too high?

The only characters in this drama who gain or have enough self-knowledge to address these questions are Jess and PJ and they are the two who have least to say to one another in the present text. So for all the efforts of the actors to make their characters more rounded and sympathetic this play tells us more about the anger in the air after the events of 2008 than it gives pointers to how we should think of the world of Canary Wharf in the future.

Roaring Trade runs at the Park Theatre until 24 October 2015