Can your credit card buy you happiness? Dennis Kelly’s sharp, sad new play, first seen at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and now marking the opening of the stunningly refurbished Young Vic’s new Maria studio, lends an attentive and intelligent ear to the siren song of consumerism — then mercilessly counts the cost.
Anna Fleischle’s white, angular set is both elegant and clinical. Along with Matthew Dunster’s searing direction, it creates a world of alienation and loneliness, where we judge one another, and ourselves, by our salaries and communicate through the impersonal intermediary of technology. David (John Kirk), an IT worker, is conducting an e-mail affair, which progresses nicely until his love interest becomes curious about his former wife, Jess (Kellie Bright).
When he confesses that Jess attempted to kill herself after running up £70,000 debt — and that he, returning home to find her half alive, finished her off — the correspondence abruptly ceases, leaving David marooned with his guilt and grief. The play slides backwards in time, through Jess and David’s mounting anguish and disintegrating marriage, to a heartbreaking scene in which Jess, in the euphoric first flush of love, is filled with the wonderment of being alive — but, fatally, longs for a shiny, bright future more like the ads on TV than her “scruffy” past.
Kelly points up the way in which material goods can be used to fill an emotional void, as well as satisfying aspirations fed by advertising, easy credit and competitiveness. In one scene, Jess’s bereaved mum and dad (excellent Joanna Bacon and Paul Moriarty) work themselves into a frothing fury of envy over the extravagantly expensive monument a widower has erected on his wife’s grave, alongside their daughter’s more subdued headstone. In another, David’s ex girlfriend (Claudie Blakley) uses her superior professional position to exact a humiliating revenge when he comes to her company begging for a job. Money’s power, not only to enhance but to diminish our lives and our humanity, is horribly apparent.
A chorus of non-specific voices discussing the relationship between creditor and debtor, while it underlines the detachment with which life-changing financial decisions are often made, would be more effective were it fully dramatised.
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But this is tough, potent writing that smells pungently of cold cash and desperation.
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