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.