The Power of Yes: A serious indictment of capitalism

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The Power of Yes: A serious indictment of capitalism
David Hare at the National Theatre
By Paul Stuart
22 December 2009

In the wake of the financial crisis, the British theatre has sought to
address the crisis of capitalism. This summer the Soho Theatre mounted
a two-week season of short pieces entitled Everything Must Go! Lucy
Prebble’s Enron sold out its run at the Royal Court and is
transferring to the West End in the spring. The Royal Shakespeare
Company will stage Dennis Kelly’s The Gods Weep at the same time.

As significant as the number of plays and the quality of the casts
they are attracting, is the fact they are routinely packing theatres out.

The National Theatre commissioned David Hare to write a play about the
2008 financial crash. Hare belongs to an important group of British
playwrights radicalised during the 1960s and 1970s. In recent works he
has scrutinised aspects of capitalism, from the consequences of the
privatisation of British Rail (Permanent Way, 2004) to the Labour
government’s colonial conquest of Iraq (Stuff Happens, 2004). Here he
finds himself focusing on the capitalist system itself.

Despite his reservations about producing such a play, Hare engaged in
serious study. He read extensively on the crisis and worked closely
with an economist hired by the National to explain the financial
markets, while interviewing economists and bankers.

This journey through the financial and political elite and his
attempts to understand the crash form the substance of the play. Hare
himself is the central character. Guided through the financial world
by Masa Serdarevic (Jemima Rooper), his voyage of discovery through
the mechanics of capitalism is shared by the audience. Hare is played
with the right balance of intelligence, confusion, and outrage by
Anthony Calf.

In the opening scene he tells the audience, “It doesn’t pretend to be
a play. It pretends only to be a story. And what a story! How
capitalism came to a grinding halt. Where were you on September 15,
2008? Do you remember? Did you even notice? Capitalism ceased to
function for about four days. This summer I set out to find out what
had happened.”

In the opening scenes, bankers and financial advisers offer Hare
advice on how to write a play. Some try to deter him: a banker says,
“By the time your play comes out the whole thing’s going to be over.”
The banking crisis will be “interesting as anthropology but not much
else. How on earth do you bring to life securitised debt arrangements?”

Some try to push him towards easy villains. George Soros (Bruce Myers)
says Hare could write a whole play about Alan Greenspan, who is
obsessed with Ayn Rand. Others are overtly hostile to any examination
of capitalism. One says that nobody wants to see “political crap,”
while a mortgage lender asks him aggressively if he wants “a different
system.”

Hare has long resisted the idea that theatre should provide easy
answers, and this play certainly does not do so. Its greatest
achievement lies in its examination of the ideological and cultural
bankruptcy of the financial political elite. A mortgage lender tells
him, “Capitalism works when greed and fear are in the correct balance.
This time they got out of balance. Too much greed, not enough fear.”

Hare is nevertheless able to point to the deeper-going systemic nature
of the economic crisis, and its political implications. He has been
criticised in the right-wing press for failing to provide a suitably
villainous individual who might divert attention from the systemic
collapse of an entire economic and political order. Hare’s portrayal,
which is truer to reality, is much more satisfying.

He has said, “The temptation is to treat the financial crisis as
though it were an independent phenomenon, a freak event that can only
be interpreted in specialist publications or understood by the trained
priesthood of the Harvard Business School. But is it a coincidence
that the collapse of the financial system was followed, in this
country at least, by a collapse of belief in the political system? Is
it chance that the luckless victims of the collapse are never its
perpetrators?”

One such perpetrator was Harvard professor Myron Scholes (Malcolm
Sinclair). We see Scholes at a blackboard chalking up his now-infamous
formula for pricing options that was supposed to eliminate risk from
financial transactions and provide a steady increase in profitability.
We move quickly to Scholes receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics. In
1994, Scholes became a hedge fund partner in Long Term Capital
Management. After initially reaping enormous profits, they used his
mathematical formula to permit borrowing at a ratio of fifty to one. A
year later the company “experienced losses which its computers had
said were mathematically impossible” and went bust.

Asked if the crisis had affected his views, Scholes insists, “I
haven’t changed my ideas.” More than once Hare takes the audience from
laughter to incredulity just by quoting the financial elite. Hare
probes the cultural decline of the ruling elite through their own
observations about themselves. He relates this decline to deep-going
economic processes.

One demoralised industrialist tells Hare that this is a world in which
people “don’t even know about the past.” He compares it with an
earlier period, when the shadow of the Great Depression still loomed
over banking. Banking was organised on the principle “debt one third,
equity two thirds” because bankers had “a cultural memory about when
risk gets out of control.” The new generation has no such memory.

No one could escape the vortex of financial parasitism, regardless of
their personal apprehension. Private equity pioneer Ronald Cohen (Paul
Freeman) quotes Citibank’s Chuck Prince as saying, “As long as the
music’s playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” The banks, says
Cohen, “were all in a dancing marathon.... You don’t dare stop,
because your clients will remove their money and take it to another
bank which is still dancing. And meanwhile the building is falling
down, the roof is open to the sky, the hall’s slipping off the pier....”

The wealth of detail and comment Hare uncovers builds up a compelling
picture of a system in collapse.

In a scene about the appearance of Fred Goodwin, the former head of
the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), before a House of Commons Select
Committee, Hare has a financial journalist explain how Goodwin was
“angry at the markets for not behaving in what he regards as a
rational manner.” Senior banker Lord Freud has said that Hare’s play
“captured some of the spirit of the system which no one understood
rather clearly.” There is a striking scene where a Bank of England
seminar, held to congratulate its top staff for having maintained
stability, is interrupted by news of the collapse of Northern Rock.

Hare draws out exactly what Goodwin represented. Soros explains that,
prior to the crash, RBS was the biggest company in the world. It had
assets of £1,900 billion, when British Gross National Product was only
£1,500 billion. These statistics get a big reaction from the audience,
but Soros points out that this was just one bank.

Hare notes an important detail of Soros’s own biography, when he
states how real the Russian Revolution always was for him, as his
father had escaped from it. Soros is ready to exploit the unfolding
catastrophe, but he is also conscious of its social impact.

The interview with Soros in his apartment is one of the most powerful
scenes in the play. Soros concludes with a comment that “the people
who end up paying the price are never the people who get the
benefits.” Or, as a Citizens Advice Bureau deputy director (Jeff
Rawle) puts it, “In our office we see trouble trickle down. But not
wealth.”

http://wsws.org/articles/2009/dec2009/powe-d22.shtml

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