We were not overly impressed with this play.
David Hare is very good at burrowing around all manner of interesting topics, but I suspect he was too far away from his spheres of knowledge and understanding with the financial crisis.
Hare almost admits as much, as the narrator of the play is a somewhat perplexed author.
So to me, Hare was making the obvious points about the financial crisis well enough, but there was little dramatic tension and no new insight in the piece.
Janie liked it a bit more than i did, but I suspect that she got more out of it, being less steeped in the financial crisis in the first place.
- Michael Billington in the Guardian really liked it;
- Charles Spencer in The Telegraph bemoaned “lots of facts but little drama”;
- Paul Taylor in The Independent was ambivalent about it.
I’m glad we saw it, but this is second division work from a first division playwright. There was little a good cast and production could do to save it.