The title is a phrase coined by a strategist for Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign amid the recession and its deployment in this show is emphatically ironic. To cite recession as the cause of a broken economy is, according to writer-performer Joe Sellman-Leava, like blaming the weather for causing climate disaster.
This becomes self-evident over the course of this dramatised lecture he performs with Dylan Howells as they blend macroeconomics with the micro effects on Sellman-Leava’s early family life. He was born around the time of the presidential campaign statement and tells us how his shop-owning parents lost their business, and faced the shame of bankruptcy, bailiffs and eviction. Alongside this he describes his fascination with money and maths as a young boy: “Maths was logical, money was magic,” he says.
Howells sits on the sidelines or re-arranges the set of towering cardboard boxes, but he throws out wry asides and stops Sellman-Leava from spinning into soap-box polemic (“Joe tends to go off on one … so I’m like a regulator”).
Developed with and directed by Katharina Reinthaller, the show uses the metaphor of a game of Monopoly to make its ethical points around financial dealing, which only half comes off. Sellman-Leava and Howells are an effective double act, though, with a prickly affability between them – the former funnels a potted modern history of the British economy through his personal story while Howell acts as his foil, with occasional magic tricks to boot, which are a delight.
The point is to explain to ordinary folk the workings of the economy, from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to John Maynard Keynes, Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme, privatisation, low taxes for the rich, the machinations of modern banking and the current housing and energy crises.
It is a tall order in the space of an hour, and you do not always get more than a passing line on each or hit upon the more complex intricacies but both performers bring charisma and intelligence. You want this lesson to continue and dig deeper so it can hit harder.
At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 26 August
