Tuesday 16th March, Cambridge Guildhall
We don’t normally review contemporary theatre at the The Bar, but this might be of interest to some of you.
In The Money you choose to buy a ticket as a Benefactor (donating £10 minimum) or as a Silent Witness. Benefactors get to play the game whilst silent witnesses, as their name suggests, witness silently. All the money collected by the benefactors is collected into a pot, and once sat down and the concept explained by the steward (the rules are not read out, a sheet is there for one of the Benefactors to read out once the game begins) a clock begins – it sounds like two hours is the usual but it was 90 minutes in this performance.
The object, quite simply is for the Benefactors to unanimously decide what to with the pot (£210 this evening) and to decide that at the end of the period. If they cannot decide the money will rollover to the next event (the rules point out that this should not be considered a failure).
This starts off slowly, the rules are read out, someone will put forward an idea, it’ll get shouted down, someone will put forward a better idea, everyone will almost agree to it, and then everyone realises there’s still 75 minutes until the close so other avenues of discussion open up, so that fifteen minutes later nobody can really agree on anything at all – forced nature of the time limit is quite clever.
What’s quite interesting is that if the video is anything to go by, when you give a group of people this one single decision most groups will have the same arguments and suggest the same or similar ideas. Alturistic or hedonistic? The individual or the group? Should we just give it to one of us in a lottery? Should we just spend it on the lottery? Which charity is more worthy? Local or international?
I thought it was a shame that all the Benefactors (and indeed the Silent Witnesses) were self-selecting middle-class poncy types, if you only ever see the show once that’s fine but if you see it multiple times I think you’d yearn for some different points of view and arguments. Or maybe they’d have the same arguments. And maybe that’s the point.
One quite interesting fillip is that Silent Witnesses are expected to be silent, but at any time they can ring a bell, throw a tenner into the pot and become a Benefactor if they don’t like the way the conversation’s going, and this happened three times last night in the final ten minutes – one because he thought there would be a Mole (or something, see below), someone else who wanted to be part of the “if we can’t decide we’ll just have a draw for it” lottery suggested, and a third who decided they wanted in on the draw as well except half the ballots had been drawn by that point messing the whole thing up with not enough time to redo everything. On the flipside Benefactors can opt to bang a gong and become a Silent Witness if they want to not have to come to a decision.
Doing the show in real life civic places is meant to bring home the idea that the whole thing is meant as a sort of mirror of real life financial decisions. Unfortunately there’s one big downside to this, especially at the Guildhall, and that’s the acoustics are terrible, sadly. My hearing’s not the best, but it was really hard to make out some of the discussion, we’re probably only sitting two metres away from (albeit a large) discussion area and the combination of non-actors who don’t really project and large echo-y room made it quite difficult to follow, especially in the early stages before people start getting animated.
The group did not come to a decision at the close of play so the money (£240+ by my reckoning) should roll forward to the next event, part of the Hull Heads Up Festival, on March 10th.
