Blood, bees and banking: theatre and the credit crunch
A newly homeless salesman shacks up with his wife and child in a deserted railway station; in denial, they field calls from relatives on their mobile assuring them they've simply "stopped using the landline". Two coal miners in West Virginia cuss each other about what they've lost and stand to lose from the collapse of their community. A woman trapped in a Peckham tower block wins a box of bees on a TV quiz show then launches into a searing monologue about sex, urban misery and anaphalactic shock.
These are scenes from Everything Must Go, a collection of short plays and performances commissioned by the Soho Theatre. It's all a long way from credit default swaps but, as a response to the crisis, startlingly close to truthful.
. Lisa Goldman, the artistic director at the Soho Theatre, said then she expected the definitive artistic response to the crisis to take years not months. So this collection of theatre pieces, written on the fly and with just two weeks in rehearsal, was always going to be a marker along the route to that.
What the plays explore is the human response to the crisis: something I think the news media has found hard to do. When I went to the West Midlands to make a , it turned out that the real hidden misery was the short-time working situation.
Our team spent day after day with the workforce at two small factories, who were suffering the privations of half pay and short time in something close to silence. It struck me then that the human story of this recession would be much harder to tell.
Today's "Boys From the Blackstuff" would be about estate agents bragging their way through penury, factory workers silently enduring layoffs, unsentimental visits by bailiffs and repo men to shabby council flats, outbursts of undirected anger.
This is the reality captured in Everything Must Go. Goldman, directing (with Esther Richardson and Nina Steiger), individual efforts from eleven separate writers, weaves them together with a style where everything is raw, physical and emotionally intense.
There are a couple of semi-agit vaudeville songs pillorying the financial elite, but otherwise the actual banking system does not come in for much scrutiny. It is the impact on the world of the ordinary that is explored: the Visteon worker sacked with six minutes notice, so addicted to total quality management that he can't stop till he completes the component he is working on; the salesman who can't admit to his family that he's lost his home.
These are visceral performances - from Maxwell Golden in his own rap poem Everything Must Go, and Jimmy Akingbola as the quietly fuming Visteon worker. Lara Pulver (Isabella in ´óÏó´«Ã½ One's Robin Hood) had the hardened theatre hacks sitting near me physically flinching during her performance of Megan Barker's monologue, Anaphylactic.
It seems to me that these actors are drawing on a level of anger, frustration and confusion that is actually out there and easy to tap among the generation they come from, and which, as I say, has not been properly captured yet in journalism of any genre.
Later in the year the big guns will get going. David Hare is working on for the National Theatre in October; the ´óÏó´«Ã½ is to unleash a series of documentaries on the anniversary of the Lehman collapse.
Everything Must Go is part of a counter-movement in British theatre that rejects the trend towards verbatim reconstruction in favour of fantasy, physicality and the occasional unashamed lunge towards melodrama. Amid the blood, guts, magic, fellatio, profanity and anaphalactic shock - it gets to the point.
, Soho Theatre, London until 4 July, 7.30pm.