£¥€$ (Lies)

Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed have returned to Adelaide with £¥€$, an interactive and immersive theatre experience for the 2019 OzAsia Festival.  Since its premiere in 2017 £¥€$ has been travelling the globe and immersing audiences in Moscow, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong and Shanghai plus staging a French-speaking version as an official selection for this year’s prestigious Festival d’Avignon.

The company name roughly translates as ‘feel estate’, a property pun, and their explorations of taking audiences to their limits has previously landed them in hot water.  During their show Audience, Edinburgh 2011, one performer pointed a video camera at a female audience member while loudly bullying her into “opening her legs”. Other audience members were furious, so that subsequently Ontroerend Goed used a plant.

With £¥€$ the audience has a much gentler introduction to the show, although at the entrance everyone is separated from their partners and friends as one by one you are guided to a place at one of eight casino-style semicircular tables.  In an ultra-polite atmosphere reminiscent of high-stakes gambling environments the audience take on the roles of the rich and influential patrons.  Muzak plays soothingly in the background, the lights are dim and slightly obsequious ‘croupiers’ greet you and memorize the names of the seven at each table.

All performers are dressed in black and the room seems to represent a bleak and slightly eerie casino/stock market floor hybrid with a central control area and revolving chalked scoreboard.  Some of the introductory text is creepily uttered in unison by each actor/croupier.  Other pronouncements are made by the higher level roaming controllers such as the time and temperature in the room and later how our various credit ratings are faring. 

Throughout the performance a gong sounds prior to these varying announcements and we are peppered with aphorisms like “May the odds be ever in your favour”, “A ship is always safe in the harbour but that is not what it’s built for”, “To make the golf course, you have to cut the trees”.  Our croupier also announces that “of course, finance is as exciting as watching paint dry or plants grow” but he urges us to think differently and introduces us to the format we will follow for the next hour and fifty minutes.

We seven at my table are now ‘bankers’ and are urged to empty our wallets of all cash and coins and announce the rough amount.  The table total determines our starting credit rating and we are each then invited to ‘invest’ $20 of our own money by placing it into a black envelop that will be returned to us prior to leaving.  In return we receive our chips, each worth one million.  Then the action begins.  Our guide/croupier encourages us to ‘harbour optimism’ and grow the market as much as we dare for the good of all and of course, our own wealth.  We are educated on the extant rules of taxes and how that money is distributed by government to fund the many divisions of our society for the best. Hilariously, ‘The Arts’ missed out first go! 

Each audience/banker has a dice to roll and the stakes are complex, and keep changing, but returns ‘may’ be very attractive.  Intermittently we are introduced to banking terms like ‘fractional reserve banking’ - “as real as the trust between us”.  We are also entreated to embark on the trading of bonds… big mistake!  As the temperature rises in the room we learn about ‘going short’ (don’t ask because that concept completely escaped me!) and that ‘failing has become an option’ as the entire audience tumbles inevitably toward global financial collapse.

As the pace in the room increases, the tempo, harshness and volume of the background music escalates; no longer are we wooed by soothing, elegant cocktail bar tunes.  The performer/croupier at each table has an enormous task to deliver the script, count and dispense chips, calculate returns and interact with their audience segment and the ‘controllers’ around the room. They are from The Netherlands, England and Hong Kong and are expert in their complex roles.

There is a sense of urgency and horror as we all realise that no one can ‘honour’ the bonds we so eagerly traded (and hoarded) when the bearers wish to cash in and the bonds drastically lose value.  My table had risen to an A credit rating but finally dropped to a D.  The controller/performers enlightened us all to the staggering amount we had squandered and ‘lost’, even starting with a small investment and the air turned a little inquisitorial.

I am ashamed to report that I have neither the talent or interest in complex financial dealings but my ire was definitely raised as I dabbled in this event and was reminded of the utter absurdity of global financial wheeling and dealing that leaves the hoi polloi in extremis and the wheeler-dealers bruised but intact. 

As Ontroerend Goed Director Alexander Devriendt says “many experts say that if we realised what money really is, there would be a revolution. The whole system would implode because the trust, which is essential, would melt away like snow in the sun”. 

Lisa Lanzi