Let's do lunch

I've just spent the afternoon with one of my favourite classes, doing plays about bankers and other con-men, from almost 300 years apart: Philip Massinger's very conservative comedy A New Way to Pay Old Debts (revolting city wide-boy loses his cash and daughter as punishment for being a flash social climber - the aristocratic values endure) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, an astonishing satire set in the 1980s world of investment banking and financial engineering - in verse.

In this one, the wide-boys win, though the toff bankers they replace are equally corrupt and revolting. They use the crudest sexualised language to discuss their work, though they're all too worn-out to actually have sex with anyone. They're amoral, cruel, greedy and selfish. Unfortunately, the City Boys didn't see it as a critique: legend has it that City firms block booked the theatre when it was first released, encouraging their workers to worship their fictional counterparts.

I hope my students enjoyed today's session: it's hard to analyse comedy without killing it stone dead. Some hadn't read them of course, but I like to think I've done my bit for the cause while simultaneously introducing them to literature they might not otherwise have come across. It's Gerrard Winstanley next: some of his pamphlets and Churchill's play about him, A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire.

(For your amusement: David Cameron Pretending To Be Common).

Darlings, you were WONDERFUL

Last night, Mark and I went to see Caryl Churchill's Serious Money at Birmingham Repertory Theatre. It's a great venue - all seats are good seats. The cast captured the look and feel of the 80s brilliantly, and almost all of them had appeared in The Bill at some point, which always pleases me mightily.

It's a full-on attack on the greed of the finance industry - in verse. Government, brokers, bankers and entrepreneurs plot and compete to defraud each other and to wreck the economy and ordinary peoples' lives in pursuit of short-term, personal profit - even sex palls in comparison with the thrill of the chase. If you want a funny, crude, incisive guide to why we're all going to be poor for the next few years - see this play.

Which brings me to my major point. Some of you dear readers are under 26 years old. I've suggested a kind of slow motion culture club. How about starting with free theatre tickets? It's a government scheme which theatres all over England have joined, offering 'free tickets to see any show' every Friday night at the Rep and loads of other places, until March 2011. So you could see Serious Money, or anything else. Here's the site:

A Night Less Ordinary

or

Birmingham Rep and look for 'a night less ordinary'.

Type in the area you want to go to and follow the simple instructions. I shall be polishing my fake ID in preparation.

Serious money

This isn't the first terrible recession we've been in. It isn't even the first one since I were a nipper. So it's a particularly good time to get down to Birmingham Repertory theatre, where they're restaging Caryl Churchill's Serious Money. It's a dark comedy about what happened when the boring world of raising money for companies to invest was invaded by horrible, loud, greedy, arrogant, selfish yuppie bastards - and in this case they'll stop at nothing, including murder, to get their way. It's funny AND it's true.

There's a story that City types saw it less as an attack on them and more as a lesson, leading to them block-booking theatres in 1987 so they could celebrate themselves. The gits.

Tickets range from £10, it's on until 23rd May. There's a captioned performance on the 16th, an audio-described show on the 21st, and a BSL one on May 22nd.

I'm going. It's rude (and long - 2h 35) and very instructive for our times.

Late entrants

Late additions to the list of powerful women who aren't Margaret Thatcher: Caryl Churchill, Anne of Green Gables (with some reservations), Helen Suzman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Emma Goldman, Angela Carter, Ada Babbage, Ruth First, Lauren Laverne, Franny Armstrong (thanks Neal for the latter, and Emma for the Buffy suggestion).