Play Review 2

With £¥€$ (Lies), playwright and director Alexander Devriendt questions the role of the playhouse, removing the play almost entirely in the process. Or perhaps he simply redefines a theatrical work to be synonymous with “game.” 

£¥€$ relies on full and mandatory audience participation. Devriendt’s method of audience immersion is not an unwanted pull onto the stage, but a morphing of the stage and seating, so the audience becomes improvising members of the cast. The audience experiences the responsibility— or perhaps lack thereof— in the financial world using a safe small-scale simulation. A simulation that is ever the more cynically fun only a decade after the 2008 financial crash.

In a black box theater, ten tables create a circle around the casino-style room. Each table has seven bar stools around it, the management of seats curving toward the center. A nameless croupier sits behind each table. You sit across from one of them, back to the room. Three more croupiers swarm throughout the space organizing, analyzing and manipulating the system.  

When they speak, the croupiers chant in disorienting and overwhelming unison. Their words echo a cryptic tone as they explain the rules of the gamble. You must pay for your upstart using the cash the website requested you bring (you get this cash back). You are a bank. You roll the die to invest. If you invest well, you get paid in poker chips in the color of your table’s currency. The rotating blackboard in the center tracks how well or poor all ten currencies are doing, defining them by an A, B or C rating. The gong rings, and the “banks are open.”

The game begins simple, nearly impossible to lose. New rules are introduced one at a time to merge banks, trade bonds, up the stakes of your investments, and purchase shorts for all future moves. Over the course of the following two hours, the atmosphere intensified and the stakes raised. White interrogation lights hanging over each table while Johannes Genard’s anxiety-evoking compositions slowly crescendos. Sighs, laughs, and gasps are sporadically heard over the background music.  

However, the strangest part of £¥€$ is that none of us question why the experience feels like a competition. You are both with and against the banks at your table, the other tables, and the entire system. There is an assumption that you have to win, that there is a winner. However, none of the croupiers explicitly say this. 

Intermittently, the game pauses. One of the croupiers stands beside the centerboard, relaying the latest updates. In a talk show style, she reveals the current state of the room in the form of a stock market report. She starts the time, the weather, the rankings of each currency and then the total money currently in circulation.

When the system inevitably crashes, the play’s substance is left incomplete. There is no explanation for why the crash was allowed to happen or how to prevent it. Instead, the play feels like a psychology experiment and a shrug to say don’t blame the bankers, don’t blame yourself, blame the temptations of the system next time it crashes.

Ultimately in this simulated crash, we all lose. Some of us worse than others. Perhaps this is the murky commentary of the play. Although this would offer nothing new or original to the fear-filled conversation about when our next financial crash will hit. Rather it leaves us with the warning: “and it will crash again.”

Even upon exiting, the audience still maintains the sense that some people won while others lost. Whoever earned the most, whoever was in a currency that succeeded not to crash, whoever guessed which currency would be saved gets their ego fluffed. However, what is at jeopardy is theoretical, yet the emotions supporting the stakes are very real.  

£¥€$ might not be a traditional work of theater. The purpose of the work is not clear and there seems to be no message of meaning except don’t count your money until after the market crashes, but what the play lacks in defining substance, it makes up for in fun.