Nestled between a one-woman show coming to terms with postnatal depression, and another one-woman piece grappling with the emptiness of many modern lives, four actors set about “exploring what the recent exposure of the Panama papers says about the current type of capitalism the west is experiencing right now.”

This was at least what I was told Fire Sale aimed to do, and as I made my way to Theatre 503’s first scratch night, I have to say I was impressed. It is an incredibly huge subject to take on, and I admired the chutzpah of author Christian Graham. He was asked to respond to the theme ‘awakening’. For me, this would have immediately made me think of an individual experience. Graham instead opted to speak about an incident of global proportions. It was a bold choice.

As much as I admired the ambition of the piece, it is difficult to see how it could have been realised in under fifteen minutes.

I have to admit I was confused from the get-go: after a prologue involving audio clips of political speeches concerning tax avoidance (including a sample of Jeremy Corbyn with a lot of reverb), and a physical sequence where the actors shuffle and exchange £20 notes, the action starts. A PA receives a call from an American man, and is told that she needs to book her boss tickets to New York. On Friday, The Telegraph will tell the world that his is one of the names listed in the Panama papers. I didn’t understand why this man needed to flee the country – as far as I am aware, no-one listed in these papers would have to fear jail time, as what they did was not technically illegal. Did this man instead fear scandal? Wouldn’t running off to the States provoke further scandal? Wouldn’t the scandal follow him to any country he went to, given the international scale of the event, or was he planning on lying low and completely changing his identity? I possibly was missing something, but I didn’t find that James’ flight – which, we later learn he had prepared for previously, by buying a flat in NYC and having someone “sit on [this] egg until it was warm”– was properly explained. On occasion I found it a bit hard to keep track of what was going on at a few points. There was a lot of plot, and not a lot of time to unpack it, so it was sometimes difficult to follow.

Beyond this, it felt like Graham tried to do so much in the time available that he was ultimately unable to properly develop any of his themes or characters. A relationship breaks down within a few minutes of being established, without enough time for me to properly understand these characters and their connection. The conversation between them is crammed with issues that aren’t developed. There is a discussion about feminism, but there isn’t really room in this play to get into the complexities of gender inequality. In the last minute, the PA reveals her boss – James – sexually harassed her. Again, there isn’t enough time to explore this incredibly difficult issue. There were too many things to discuss, which made the mention of these topics appear tokenistic.

There was a metaphor that used the idea of a kid hiding money in a friend’s lunch box to explain what those listed on the Panama Papers had done. It was funny, and it made me think that Graham was greatly inspired by Enron by Lucy Prebble. There were a few other flashes of humour in this piece, suggesting that Graham may have a satirist’s heart, but there just wasn’t room for comic play. Graham’s attempt to crush an epic into a matter of minutes did not achieve what I believe it set out to do, but I am curious to see what would happen if, in his next short play, he focussed on a detail rather than the whole world. I wish him the best of luck with his future work, and hope he gives himself a bit more space in his next show to really play with his characters, his plot, and his central driving idea.

 

Fire Sale played at Theatre 503 as part of the Re:Awakening scratch night on the 11 July 2016. Find out more on the Theatre 503 website.