The character playing David Hare (“the author”) in The Power of Yes starts by telling us that this isn’t a play but a “story”, and that it is a playwright’s attempt to bring the finacial crisis to life. There are strong hints throughout the play that the financial crisis is being portrayed as if it were a play in five acts, and that bankers and playwrights are really just the same as each other (they both require self-belief and think all critics are wrong).
      This is an enticing idea. And at moments it really works – in his exhaustive interviews with bankers, journalists, financiers and regulators, David Hare has uncovered some wonderfully human moments of drama. We learn that the boxes of the workers pouring out of Lehman Brothers were full not of papers but milky ways and sandwiches raided from the canteen where the traders still had credit (a word repeated with increasing cynicism throughout the play), that Alistair Darling had his mortgage with Northern Rock, that on the evening the Bank of England heard news that Northern Rock had collapsed it was holding a seminar celebrating financial stability. The opinionated, didactic style of the suits striding on and off the stage to give the Author advice on how to write his play, and on the true cause or demon of the crisis sums up wonderfully the boring know-it-all men who have lectured all of us at dinner parties, admitting of no debate and no uncertainty.
      The problem is that these two hours feel for the most part just like one of those boring dinner parties, in which a number of those men in suits (and they are all men, other than a couple of journalists) deliver short lectures on credit derivatives, the failure of capitalism and of government regulation. The Hare character asks a series of rather obvious questions, and becomes increasingly but unconvincingly despairing of the anodyne answers he receives from interviewees who cannot provide the drama he promises to deliver because they all essentially agree with each other, and all fit the same David Hare view of the world and the credit crunch. We are left with what feels like a superficial simplistic conclusion that bankers are greedy, no one was watching what was happening, and credit really doesn’t mean “trust” any more.
      Bob Crowley’s sets are wonderful, but the symbols he has to play with rather dull; giant pictures of the “evil” Greenspan, photographs of Iceland, of bubbles, of dollar signs. I was left thinking that I would have preferred the real David Hare (as in Via Dolorosa), and certainly the real George Soros (even if on television rather than a stage). It is unfortunate for Hare that the Power of Yes has to compete with Lucy Prebble’s Enron, which by contrast manages to make a financial crash story dynamic, gripping, imaginative, and visceral.
Maya Lester