Serious Money

It was only the other week, I think, that I was talking about the very perilous business of picking big hits from the Broadway theatre and taking them to London and the equally perilous business of picking London hits and fetching them to New York.

I don't believe I've ever met anyone in the theatre, on either side of the Atlantic, who ever says, 'I don't know how it would go on the other side. I'm no good at that sort of thing'. Everybody is an expert. I mentioned the names of one or two famous producers who might, indeed, claim to be experts, since they'd spent their lives choosing just those plays which they calculated, when they first backed them, would come to lead a healthy life in both London and New York. They were as often wrong as right.

But, from time to time, there comes along a producer or a playwright who hits on or invents a fashion which both countries find irresistible. At the moment, there is Mr Andrew Lloyd Webber and a very profitable moment it must be for him with his 'Cats' and his 'Starlight Express' and now his 'Phantom of the Opera' ravishing, or terrifying, packed audiences in both countries.

For once, it seems the audiences 3,000 miles apart see and enjoy the same things. Mainly, I gather, the gyrating fantasy of the cats in 'Cats', the dazzling audacity of having a train and whizzing roller-skates on the stage, a fantastically constructed theatre set in which a huge chandelier swings as ominously as another chandelier under which Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald were waltzing began to swing on that April night in 1906 when the chandelier, and about half of San Francisco, came crashing to the ground.

Mr Lloyd Webber regards the stage, any stage, as a construction site on which to build a sort of indoor Disneyland, and I seriously recommend to him that it's time he thought of doing a play called 'Earthquake' in which he would represent on, shall we say, a smashing scale, the actual San Francisco earthquake, in that he might go himself one better and wreck not merely the metal and plastic buildings on the stage, but the theatre boxes and the stalls and the theatre itself. If anybody could do this without actually wounding the audience, I believe Mr Lloyd Webber is the man.

What he has more than anyone I can think of is a gift for transforming the usual theatre, I mean a theatre with a praesidium arch and rows of seats out front for transforming into a busy circus. What he's done is to behave as if the motion picture had never been invented and he stages the sort of scene and movement that, in fact, we'd always thought couldn't be done in a theatre.

Well, evidently, both cities – London and New York – are at a stage in which, for once, they both hunger and thirst after the same theatrical fare. It's a stage, I think, of celebrating the dying kick of affluence, a stage in what we like to call our civilisation which Edward Gibbon noticed in 'The Twilight of the Roman Empire' – a love of freakishness and decoration and violent enthusiasm, costing a great deal of money. Mr Lloyd Webber, of course, I should have said, is an Englishman, Welshman perhaps, and for as far back as I can remember is the only Briton who has exported enough British musicals to dominate the Broadway stage. Since the 1920s, it's always been the other way round – the American musical dominating the London stage.

There's another English fashion, introduced in a crackling, outrageous play, perhaps I should say a crackling play about outrageous people which, I understand, has won all sorts of awards in England and which arrived here about four months ago. It's called 'Serious Money' and it's a satire on the present money mania which led to the prosecution of insider traders and to the gyrations and momentary – let's hope – collapse of the stock market on 19 October, Black Monday.

It's a breathless, headlong play, so headlong, so falling all over itself with bellowing, overlap dialogue that you have to know the English language very well indeed to catch half of it. I am not, myself, a great linguist and failed half the time.

Well, 'Serious Money' opened here, as I say, last autumn at a small theatre and was at once a hit with most of the advanced young critics and with the audiences who'd evidently heard about its triumphant London run. When an off-Broadway play does that well, the producer automatically looks for a Broadway theatre in which to extend and compound his triumph. So it was brought two weeks ago to Broadway and closed in ten days. All sorts of ingenuous and nasty reasons are being given for this sudden death.

I've talked before about the actors' unions on both sides of the ocean that are very tough about allowing a visiting cast to stay on in toto. The theory, the general principle, is that an actor/actress will be allowed to stay with the run of the play if it can be demonstrated that their talent is unique or at least is one that cannot be matched by a local. Thus, the incoming Rex Harrison or Ian Richardson would be allowed to stay and play Henry Higgins in 'My Fair Lady' here, but unless his leading lady were a performer of equal calibre, there'd have to be an American playing Eliza. It works with equal stringency in both countries.

Well, it's being said now that the American union, Actors' Equity, applied the rule brutally in the case of 'Serious Money' and forced the imported English cast to go home and leave the play in the hands of an incompetent or inferior American cast which, I quote, butchered the play. That's only one explanation offered by the particular critics or other interested parties for the swift departure of 'Serious Money'.

Another is the old wailing complaint that Broadway audiences are mindless pleasure hounds who want to be titillated by rollicking musicals or falling chandeliers. They are, I ought to mention, flocking also to Tennessee Williams and to Sondheim and the brilliant, knotty play about the World War Two code-breakers at Bletchley. It's also being said that the critics didn't rally to 'Serious Money' as they oughta, which is only half true. Half of them evidently caught all of the dialogue and called the play a gripping, mordant, first-rate satire.

The drama critic of the New York Times, who gave the original a serious and, I should have said, an approving review, rejects with a snort these offhand excuses. The trouble with 'Serious Money', he says, was the play. He thought that the dramatist's style was tabloid scatological with rhyming dialogue as punchy, low, loud and, at times, incoherent as the rawest rock and roll. In its first production here, he decided it had an abrasive integrity, but in the Broadway performance, the beat was muted, the frenzy muffled so that the play, he now writes, was nothing more than an invitation to a good night's sleep.

This is where I part company with the distinguished critic. I think the instinct of the Broadway audience, whichever way it was performed, was sound. I think 'Serious Money' had a brief highbrow appeal at the sudden peak of Wall Street's money mania. I believe it's a victim of Black Monday. Let me enlarge and go back to a similar period – the equally affluent, greedy, roaring Twenties.

The very solemn Expressionist plays of the late 1920s were being written and greatly admired by small audiences in Germany and Czechoslovakia and America. The curtain went up on one of them to show a row of characters in masks, holding on to the straps of an underground train and swaying mechanically back and forth. This was meant to show the boring and soulless life of the working classes. What it showed was how bored and soulless the author would feel if he were condemned to travelling the underground.

The play was greatly admired by highbrows who knew as little as the author about the variety and richness of character in working-class people. These Expressionist plays prepared the way for plays and poems by gifted upper middle-class literary blokes to look down from a great height on the pathos of the masses and, may I say, that those very serious, very solemn, plays have flown forgotten as the whatnot dies before the opening day.

Now, the superior attitude has gone into reverse. Now we're invited to look up in horror to the mechanical life of the yuppies. 'Serious Money' seemed to me to have the same ingredients for the self-satisfaction of the highbrow and presented with a similar driving, actually humourless, crudity. The very opening scene, a frenzy of stock bidding on a trading floor could have lasted maybe two minutes. Very good.

Maybe I was wrong to expect that the rest of the play would elaborate on what such hectic money-grubbing does to the lives of a variety of human beings, as Tom Wolfe has recently done in his brilliant and terrifying novel, 'The Bonfire of the Vanities', which begins with a similar symbolic scene.

But the frenzy of 'Serious Money' was going to go on for two hours or so. Consequently, it seemed to me, caught up in the very thing it was supposed to be satirising and came out as a crude sermon with people of flabbergasting vulgarity, over-acted, over-directed – a piece nicely calculated to impress the 1980s highbrows as the Expressionist nonsense impressed the 1920s highbrows.

I'm talking, by the way, of the London performance and I have to say that, as the interminable night howled on, the audience that was with me gave the piece only listless applause. The first act ended with a song. Well, not a song. Songs have to have tunes and tunes are now old hat. It was a chant with words shouted at a drum beat. A straightforward, four-letter chant, which in a mass circulation tabloid would have been considered a very raw bit of pornography.

It was my cue to depart briskly and relax into the comparative sanity and urbanity and serenity of the Charing Cross Road on Boxing Night.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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