Clare Duffy’s hyper-symbolic financial offering, MONEY: A Game Show, is an addition to a cult in play-writing which attempts to lay the recent financial crisis against a wider moral awareness. Lucy Prebble’s Enron, a prominent example of this trend in action, is a clear influence for Duffy, who at times scores; at others snatches at concepts, leaving them under-developed and sparse.

Set in a convincing game show studio, the show often functions via its’ audience, who are invited to partake in practical game show-esque skits which double as swipes at Hedge Fund sycophants. The challenge is to displace a real life £10,000, present on stage in a rather impressively splattered pile of pound coins.

The play, a single-act, uses pauses and musical direction to often clumsily flit between moments of tomfoolery and their subtext; the murky world of financial investment, always represented through extended scenes of lateral, splattered dialogue between the show’s two stars: ‘Some things don’t have a price for fuck’s sake’ spats Brian Ferguson’s Casino to his partner-in-moral-crime, Queenie.

Aside from the linguistic clichés, moments of high drama are often unconvincing and always seem intrusive upon the play’s lighter moments. They lack practical or provocative dramatic purpose, and are neither woundingly affecting nor ornately emotional.

Some welcome respite from these weighty verbal creases comes in the form of Lucy Allinson’s Queenie, a riotous character and pick-me-up in response to the play’s drier points. She’s a personal victim of a debt-related crisis, who’s media and corporate stink both get under your nose and whet your appetite for more.

Dissimilarly, Brian Ferguson’s Casino, although quick with wit and charming on punters, lacks any character specific charm which renders him little more than a symbol laying on the surface of Duffy’s themes. This isn’t Ferguson’s fault though, he does the best he can with what’s he’s given.

In eventually becoming one of the metaphorical financial zombie’s the play earlier alludes to, Queenie personifies all the wretch implied during the course of the play, and is subjected to symbolic stage torture, which goes some way in form of punishment for her actions. This darker cataclysm of personality is again well achieved by a ketchup-riddled Allinson, who manages to etch fine distinctions between her varying personalities when in breakdown mode: a masterful comic and media doll, a super-villian, high-flyer and debt-riddled zombie. 

Generally, it is Queenie and Casino’s frivolous audience-led interaction which manages to engage and entertain, through a series of pertinent mock-televisual feasts which stand alone in propelling Duffy’s concerns. There's no need for the droll dialogue and lengthy scenes of ‘worth’. 

These woollier moments could be bettered with more sustained direction, but in their current state, they end up showcasing impactful themes riddled with their own theatrical crisis, that of vapidity.