The award-winning French author, director and composer David Lescot’s play Dough is all about money: how a man makes it, manages it – or fails to – and mostly loses it through his lifetime.
The show – programmed at this year’s Edinburgh fringe – examines one person’s relationship with le fric (as “dough” translates in French) as a continuous transaction between themselves and others.
Lescot opens this fast-paced, funny and bittersweet account with money his alter ego’s grandmother put into trust for him as a baby and closes it after a spot of negotiation with the funeral director.
In between, our hero’s financial credits and debits include discovering the tooth fairy and pocket money, making a disastrous investment, being scammed, struggling to provide as a young father and haggling over a vacuum cleaner.
“Money is not just money, it’s the link, the quest or the evil that decides our relationships, our choices, our destinies,” Lescot writes.
Sitting in a Paris cafe opposite the Théâtre de la Ville, where his independent Compagnie du Kaïros is based, Lescot, 51, admits the narrative is “very personal”.
“I wanted to look at the entire life of a person from birth to death purely from the perspective of their relationship with money,” he says. “It fascinates me because our entire life and existence turns around money – the fact of having it or lacking it. The play is a reflection on this and how relations between people are affected by money.
“The (main) person in the play is not talented with money. In fact, he’s a loser, but even as a loser he can find his way through life. He arrives at a kind of calm serenity even being such a loser with money and ends up finding a certain peace because by the end he has put some distance between himself and money.”
Lescot says he is “able to find a kind of equilibrium in my own life through the play” by looking at difficult things with humour. “For me, money is a means not a goal,” he adds. “I chose a career that isn’t famous for making lots of money but I earn a good living and that is already a win. I have known difficulties and problems with money, I’ve known what it is not to have money. My aim is to have enough, not to earn a lot.”
Dough was originally commissioned by the Comédie-Française as one of a series of short plays. It was translated into English and performed in New York last year where the main character, Me, was played by Zach Lusk. He was supported by Matthew Brown and Hannah Mitchell who portray more than 40 characters in his life in a non-stop succession. The same three actors will perform in Edinburgh.
The New York theatre critic Erin Kahn hailed it as “a smart, mesmerising, nearly perfect production that reminded me why I love theatre”.
Lescot says he feels the play works better in English than in French. “Its register is more suited to English and American theatre which is less about putting people and things in boxes. Of course, a tragedy is still a tragedy and a farce a farce in any language, but what I like about plays in English is that something can be very funny but at the same time hard and difficult.”
He adds: “It’s a very rapid, non-stop look at a life in 60 minutes. It’s all very simple, there’s nothing on stage, just a rectangle of light and the various people around the main character who enter and leave the light. Often when we get older towards the end we look back on our lives and I have tried to do that in the play.”
So everything is about the money, it seems, except Lescot’s decision to take Dough to Edinburgh. “We won’t make any … not enough to cover the costs,” Lescot says looking cheerful all the same. “But it’s Edinburgh. It’s an international platform for theatre, so I think it’s worth doing. The most important thing is for the play to be seen, shown to a wider public and hopefully it will interest other theatres. Financially, it’s a calculated risk.”
Dough is at Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, 2-28 August
This story was amended on June 15 to correct David Lescot’s age.
