Emily Hill
posted 12 December 2006

There are subtler ways Dennis Kelly could have got his anti-consumerist message across than his new play Love and Money. Hanging Margaret Thatcher from the rafters whilst an irate Polly Toynbee beat her dead husk with an orphaned South African would have been one way. Kelly mounting the stage and delivering a fire and brimstone sermon on the evils of advertising whilst burning all his branded possessions, tearing up adverts and crying might have been another. But neither of these alternatives could have bludgeoned you with quite the panache of Love and Money.  Or with quite the hypocrisy either, because for a play damning the effects of money, the theatre programme looks mighty lush, and the audience had shelled out 15 quid a ticket.

The deluxe theatre programme outlines the plot: 'David conducts an office romance by e-mail. He has love at his fingertips. But a shocking admission [about the death of his wife, Jess] unravels his relationship piece by chilling piece.' Here is the shocking admission. On the day of his wife's death, David explains over email, he was test- driving an Audi, which he could not afford because 'we had debts… [ominous pause]… My wife had debts.' He arrived home to find his wife, lying on the bed. She was depressed. She'd swallowed 30-40 Xanax, but 'hadn't done it properly' as she hadn't drunk any alcohol. So he sat around for an hour and waited for her to get it over. But she still didn't die. So with the aid of some Smirnoff and a straw greased with butter, he finishes the job so he can afford his Audi.

It's not really very chilling, because the scenario's totally unrealistic. And then we leap, for over an hour, from one totally unrealistic shred of didacticism to another.

In fact, one of the strengths of the play is its structure - so this first scene segues very nicely into the last of the play (which is also the first if taken chronologically) and cutting into the middle we have a sort of psychotic montage where Jess has her breakdown as she can't decide which pair of forks to buy, and a completely unconnected episode in which a deluded young office worker gives a seedy old corporate pervert her knickers. As a creative unit, the whole moves along very briskly and sustains the interest, but the didacticism kills the dramatic effect stone dead. Most annoying is director Matthew Dunster’s device of having the actors speak to the audience, instead of to each other. When David is conducting his 'office romance by email' he does not sit in front of the computer typing away, he gets up and addresses the audience, barraging them with his witticisms with all the charm of David Brent at a corporate seminar. The scenes that are funniest and most effective occur when the characters do speak to each other: Claudie Blakley is quite magnificent as David's ex-girlfriend Val and the disgruntled office worker who sends her boss a Christmas card made from the corpse of a mouse.

Till 16 December 2006