Losing the plot | 28 February 2013

Who got the most out of the credit crunch? Security guards, repossession firms, bailed-out banks and, of course, playwrights. Anders Lustgarten is the latest to cash in on five years of global misery with If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep. The play, like the title, is effortful, disjointed and cumbersome. In the first half, a gang of fatcat bankers sets up a new financial instrument, Unity Bonds, which will generate profits from socially useful behaviour. This intriguing idea is sidelined in the second half. The action moves to a squatter camp where the banking system is about to be put on trial.

Lustgarten assumes, no doubt correctly, that the audience is more in sympathy with anti-capitalists than with high finance. So he sets about smearing the culture of the City. A contrite Goldman Sachs insider describes the thrill of his career. Press a button, he says, and a thousand people in Mumbai lose their jobs. ‘Do you have any idea how good that feels?’ Even allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, this is a fantasy. No banker has the drone-like power to zap an Indian factory from a computer screen in Canary Wharf. And to imagine that anyone would derive pleasure from destroying strangers’ livelihoods is just bizarre. Bankers get a kick out of making money and that means creating prosperity, not exterminating it.

Lustgarten, perhaps without realising it, also exposes the anti-capitalist squatters as a gang of hypocritical, sanctimonious thugs. They’re keen to denounce all property rights except when the property in question is their own. They’re even prepared to intimidate innocents to defend the privileges of ownership. One protestor, believing himself to have been bilked by a local café, demands a refund and threatens to ‘occupy’ the premises if his request is denied.