Money…The Game Show – Theatre Review – The Arches/Traverse

You are currently viewing Money…The Game Show – Theatre Review – The Arches/Traverse

Jonny Casey

12.04.11

Tickets for Platform 18 shows (14-17th April) on sale now from Traverse Box Office: 0131 228 1404 // www.traverse.co.uk

Money… The Game Show


Platform 18 award-winning playwright Clare Duffy brings us the brilliant and exhilarating interactive play ‘Money – The Game Show’. Duffy invites the audience to play and gamble with six thousand pound coins in a game show style play which challenges and questions our modern attitudes to risk management, the banking system and personal greed.

The play stars Brian Ferguson and Pauline Lockhart as a pair of ex-hedge fund managers introducing the audience to the seedy world of banking and risk management, or as we now know, lack of it. Ferguson and Lockhart perform with flair and energy, truly bringing the play to life. Their delivery style encourages the audience to become heavily involved in the characters story and the excitement of the game show production.

Duffy’s play achieves two difficult objectives with considerable eloquence: it clearly explains different banking procedures, all the while maintaining the focus on entertaining and engaging the audience. We are all made part a story in which, as a society, we are all deeply embroiled – whether we chose to acknowledge this in our daily lives.

Audience participation as a theatrical device serves two key purposes: it provides an original and unconventional twist to the play; and also allows Duffy to raise key themes about our own attitudes to money. As members of the audience shovel up in haste buckets of coins to be thrown in an old suitcase before a bubble bursts, we are forced to witness the animalistic hunger and disrespect that many of the world’s leading banking institutes demonstrated in regards to our own pensions and savings in their desperate bids make profit, at all costs.

Plays are perhaps not the first idea for a night out for many students, but on the basis of the calibre of Platform 18 and Brick Award shows we would encourage you, the student masses, to challenge your perceptions and preconceptions.

Theatre Review, 6/4/11, 8pm, The Arches

‘Money…The Game show’ runs at the Traverse, Edinburgh 14-17th April 2011 – don’t miss it!!

About The Arches

The Arches as a venue offers a great variety of plays and concerts at excellent prices, allowing everybody the opportunity to experience an alternative, entertaining night out.  It is actually the better-known club nights and gig-signings that help fund the theatrical and arts shows that are part of the venue’s core artistic ethos. Watch out for upcoming coverage, including previews and reviews of 22nd April’s Nightwalk – a celebration of fashion, electronic music, photography, visual art and everything in between.

ABOUT PLATFORM 18:

This annual New Work Award supports the Scotland’s best emergent theatre makers by offering them a unique opportunity to stage a fully funded production at the Arches and the Traverse Theatre (also in conjunction with the National Theatre of Scotland).  – The Arches, March 2011.

Author

0 0 votes
Article Rating

Leave a Reply

2 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Alan Cummings
Alan Cummings
12 years ago

Great piece, nice to read about young people having a passion for theatre and supporting home grown talent. Keep up the hard work.
Alan

Helena Maguire
Helena Maguire
12 years ago

Lovely review – insightful, engaging and energetic.