When it comes to the crunch, this is too trite
Theatre
THE POWER OF YES
The National Theatre
***
“THIS is not a play,” the narrator announces ominously as the curtains open. Instead it is a “story” of the credit crunch conducted through interviews with key financial figures, including mathematician Myron Scholes (Malcolm Sinclair) co-father of the Scholes-Black option-pricing model which underpinned much financial wizardry, FSA head Adair Turner (also Sinclair), and hedge fund guru George Soros (Bruce Myers).
Writer David Hare was commissioned by the National Theatre following several plays that unpack current crises – Stuff Happens dealt with the Iraq War and Via Dolorosa the Israel-Palestine conflict. He went about his job dutifully, and the result is something like a dramatised Power Point presentation.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not deeply enjoyable. The acting is superb. But the less you know about finance, the more you’ll enjoy this play. The narrator/Hare figure admits to keeping his money in the Post Office and doesn’t know what securitised credit arrangements are, nor quantitative easing – watching them explained is lovely if you don’t know, possibly irksome if you do.
That said, the narrator’s credit crunch lesson (and ours) is conducted by a figure so compelling that you can just enjoy the sound of her voice even if you are already familiar with what she’s explaining – the Serbian Masa Serdarevic (Jemima Rooper), a 24 year old ex-Lehman Brothers employee about to join the Financial Times. She sounds sage, cheerful, sanguine – and above the mess that she so clearly explains. Bruce Myers is great and Ian Gelder is a wonderfully disgruntled private equity investor.
What grates, ultimately, is Hare’s too-predictable personal stance. At the very end the narrator starts huffing and puffing about what bankers and capitalism have done to us – it’s an unsophisticated and boring take-home message that mars the otherwise engaging production.
Zoe Strimpel
Film
UP
Cert: PG
****
UP is the latest cartoon from Pixar, the company behind Toy Story, Finding Nemo and last year’s WALL-E. While it doesn’t quite trump those films, it certainly shares the latter’s tendency to pull on the heart-strings. An early sequence that takes us silently through the entire cycle of a loving relationship – from childhood romance to married life and eventual bereavement – put tears in my eyes just 15 minutes in.
Thereafter it’s a hoot. The bereaved old man, Carl Frederiksen, sets out on the adventure he and his wife always put off – going in search of a fabled land in South America, and taking the house with them. With thousands of colourful balloons streaming out from the chimney, he drifts off into the sky, with a tubby boy scout called Russell mistakenly along for the ride.
In their lost world they encounter talking dogs, a giant bird with a taste for chocolate, and a dastardly old hunter-explorer who’s been stranded here for decades plotting his glorious return.
Up is a cheerily whimsical and old-fashioned dream adventure, with some good jokes and, as you’d expect, miraculous animation – the finale with characters clambering around the outside of a soaring blimp is quite dizzying. We’re used to such visual dazzle now though, and it’s the film’s touching emotional heart that sticks in the memory.
Timothy Barber
Art
POP LIFE
Tate Modern
***
TATE Modern’s winter show, a tour through art’s response to consumerism over the past 30 years, made headlines last week due to a work by Richard Prince featuring pictures of the 10-year-old Brooke Shields nude. Given that the show presents gossip-mongering and controversy as the holy grail of modern artistic ambition, one can only imagine the curators to have been delighted with the brouhaha that followed.
The show takes Andy Warhol’s glitzy, celebrity-obsessed late period as the jumping-off point for an exhibition of art which tackles the consumerism. Three of the artists on show display themselves in pornographic situations, including Jeff Koons’ monumental images of himself copulating with his porn-star wife. Elsewhere Piotr Uklanski’s wall of Hollywood Nazis is a sharp piece of satire, and a room of Takashi Murakami’s Japanese pop fantasies is a colourful release from the general sense of grubbiness. Of course, there has to be a Damien Hirst section, with a sheep lurking in formaldehyde, a spot painting, and a pair of real-life twins sitting back reading magazines.
There’s lots of arresting imagery here, but the ideas get lost and it all feels rather arbitrary and scattershot. It’s fun, in a lurid and slightly sickly way, but I’m not sure the exhibition says much about either art or life.
TB