Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Andrew Scott have an animal attraction for business in 'Roaring Trade.'
A Paines Plough presentation in association with Soho Theater of a play in one act by Steve Thompson. Directed by Roxana Silbert.
Jess - Phoebe Waller-Bridge
Donny - Andrew Scott
PJ - Nicolas Tennant
Spoon - Christian Roe
Sean - Jack O'Connor
Sandy - Susan Vidler
It's not just the financial downturn that makes Steve Thompson's satirical expose of the backstabbing antics of City bond traders feel dated and superfluous. It's the overfamiliarity of the material via countless previous depictions, from films ("Wall Street," "Working Girl," "Rogue Trader," "Boiler Room") and plays ("Glengarry Glen Ross," "Serious Money") to TV series. Thompson, whose political satire "Whipping It Up" transferred to the West End in 2007, certainly has a skill for nasty-snappy dialogue, and Andrew Scott offers a sinuously compelling central performance, but there's a numbing predictability to the subject matter, not enlivened by Roxana Silbert's flat staging.
Play opens with drawling hottie Jess (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) demanding that job interviewee Donny (Scott) strip to his waist, beg like a dog and put his penis in her Filofax to prove his desire to play with the big boys and girls at McSorley's -- "second largest bank in the Square Mile." And the subtlety continues from there.
Turns out, in what will be the first of many staple-of-the-genre plot twists, that the pair are already colleagues -- two of the floor's star traders -- and Jess has agreed to this kinky role-play in return for insider tips. Donny's mastery of his universe is threatened by the arrival of recent Cambridge grad Spoon (so named by Donny -- "Silver spoon. Born with. In your mouth." -- and played by promising newcomer Christian Roe), who goes from green to shark faster than you can say "Read the bulletins. Swiss are in freefall."
An attempt to inject humanity via a subplot about the attempt of past-it trader PJ (Nicolas Tennant) to escape the rat race is blighted by the uber-cliched depiction of his wife Sandy (Susan Vidler, looking understandably uncomfortable) as a materialistic, slave-driving harridan ("You bought me sapphires. I'm not going to make do with a pair of slippers at Christmas.")
On paper, Donny is straight out of central casting as the working-class lad done good, but Scott injects a sly, angular intelligence to the role. He lets us frequently glimpse the calculation -- and increasing desperation -- behind the character's swagger. In the play's two best scenes, we see Donny successfully transforming prepubescent son Sean (Jack O'Connor) into his Mini-Me via trading lessons carried out with McDonald's ketchup packets. The complicity and shared humor between Scott and 13-year-old O'Connor, a big comic talent in the making, spreads much-needed warmth.
Depicting the frenzied activity and expensive trappings of a gilt-edged bank in a studio theater space is never going to be easy. But Silbert's choices repeatedly draw attention to the relative poverty of means available here. There is a clunking literalism to the constant moving of desks to shift locations from office to train platform to backyard. And a more decisive solution might have been found to the problem of costuming characters that would clearly be clotheshorses when the budget ran to only one stylish suit each.
But the overriding problem is that popular culture has covered this material so many times before, and the brilliance of "The West Wing," "The Wire" and "Mad Men" has raised the bar immensely on behind-the-scenes-at-work drama in any medium. Satire works when there is new comic power to be mined out of institutions and situations, but this world has been skewered, parodied and fetishized to death.
The reinscription of stereotypes of women is particularly dispiriting; yes, the characters overtly discuss the problem of Jess' need to whore herself for the job, but seeing this somehow overturned or destabilized would have injected a much-needed jolt of freshness and topicality. It's hard to fathom what two major new-writing companies, Paines Plough and Soho Theater, were thinking in greenlighting such tired material.
Sets and costumes, Kandis Cook; lighting, Wolfgang Goebbel; sound, Matt McKenzie; IT/media design, Matt Kirby; production stage manager, Matt Noddings. Opened Jan. 12, 2009. Reviewed Jan. 13. Running time: 1 HOUR, 35 MIN.
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Date in print: Thu., Jan. 15, 2009