Thoughts on morality

It was such a relief to hear such a potent exposition of what’s been going wrong; this inability to balance the view that markets are not necessarily a bad thing with the awareness that you must at all times be aware of consequences. But the lecture really took off when a hedge-fund manager in the audience at Broadcasting House suggested in the question-and-answer session afterwards that the bankers who are now so reviled for breaking the system were actually trying to do good. They ‘showed no prejudice’ when they doled out mortgages to those who previously would never have qualified for them. It was like being talked at by a ‘religious’ fundamentalist, when nothing you can say will divert them from their rigid train of thought.

This week’s Worldplay on the World Service (Saturday) also took us into the realm of ethics as a young woman in need of a heart transplant finds a donor in a far-off place. Tim Crouch’s hour-long play England (directed by Marion Nancarrow) was an inventive and surprisingly gripping auditory experience, taking us from the Whitechapel Art Gallery in the East End to a hotel room 8,000 miles away where the young woman and her boyfriend encounter problems of translation and interpretation. There were clunky moments but I had to keep on listening to find out where Crouch was taking us.

Much of the dialogue was shared interchangeably between the two actors, Tim Crouch and Hannah Ringham, so that Tim sometimes played his girlfriend and vice versa. You might think this would lead to confusion but it took the play right inside the mind, as their thoughts about what was happening to them criss-crossed with what was actually being said — just as in life.