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Latitude
2011
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Latitude Festival 2011 Reviews (3)CrunchWritten, directed and performed by Gary McNair "What's the world's biggest abstract theory?" Gary McNair asks his audience, encouraging shouts. Capitalism, religion, perception, socialism, monogamy, science? Yes, this is a Latitude audience all right - educated, witty, up for it. Finally someone shouts "Money", which gets the bingo sign from McNair. He wants to talk to us about money, and the monetary systems according to which the world currently runs; and the sham that they are. He whizzes us through the history of the human species. First the moment where the basic caveman decided that he had something, food or fire or whatever, that he would share with his mates, but only if they offered him something in return, and so currency was born. And then when gold started to be used as currency - because it's shiny, and it's rare; and then the point where the gold started to be put into locked storage and money became the paper representative of the gold in the bank. And that's where it all started to go wrong, McNair argues, because "money becomes merely a promise that the gold exists"; there began to be more paper in circulation than gold in the bank, so the system is only sustained as long as everyone believes the gold is there. "It's all just a system of belief, maintained by confidence", McNair declares, even as he's cheerfully puncturing our confidence there and then. And then he tries a practical experiment. He has an envelope containing an undisclosed amount of money, and he asks the audience to bid for it. Whoever wins it will genuinely have to pay the amount they pledged. The bidding hots up amazingly fast, until two bidders are upping each other by a penny each time. The girl who finally wins the envelope finds it contains double the amount she paid for it - phew! (I wonder if McNair would stop the bidding if people started to actually bid more than the amount they'd win?) It's an interesting exercise in belief - the driving force behind the gambling impulse. McNair is basically saying that throughout our daily lives we operate under this same unfounded belief: as we are living within the current financial system, and depend on it. But he is asking us to try and break free from the tyranny of money. He tries to offer an audience member things of no monetary value - a go on his motorbike, a personal tour of Glasgow etc - in exchange for something of monetary value - the guy's umbrella. The guy won't have it. (But then, it is pouring down outside.) It just proves how hard it is to actually break from the system by which we all live our lives. So McNair instead asks us for a gesture of defiance. He asks if an audience member will come down on stage and shred a note from their own wallet. Nervous titters spread through us. McNair describes it as a "vaccine against potential financial hardship": if we can start to dissuade ourselves now of the value of money, we won't care so much if we one day find ourselves worse off in monetary terms. It's a self-help tool, he seems to be saying; a way to change our mentality, to start to free ourselves of those mental shackles that keep us enslaved to money: a way of saying to ourselves, "I'm more valuable than the money I carry". And, he points out, most our money is wasted anyway - spent on stuff we don't ultimately need. So is this not just as legitimate a way of disposing of it? Even more legitimate maybe - exchanging money for the prospect of improved mental health? McNair is a superb showman, and it's fascinating watching him whip up a crowd, and seeing how that crowd reacts. Mutters of "yeah right" and "madness" fly around; and yet a fair proportion of the audience are with him - in theory at least, if not in practice. But then a few people do commit - take a note out of their own pockets, and shred it on stage. Admittedly, one of them is the girl who won the envelope, so she's merely giving away a fraction of the cash she's just won - not quite the same thing as leaving the theatre tent with actually less money than she arrived with. But it's a brilliant idea for a show - a practical demonstration of faith; the disposing of money being of course just as much an exercise in belief. And the piece could not possibly work in any other medium, it needs to be theatre: because it's about crowd mentality as well, and how belief is more powerful when it is mass belief - how the people who shredded their money might only have been persuaded to do so by the presence of a couple of hundred people watching them do it. Much food for thought. But I am, admittedly, glad to have left the arena holding the same cash I went in with - to buy, you know, actual food. Enslaved to the way of the world, but there it is. Corinne Salisbury
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