[Below, Troxel examines Serious Money as a "post-modern comedy of manners. "]

Big Bang! Marzipan set! Ivan the Terrible! OIKS! DINKS! OINKS! All terms from the newest Orwellian world—The City, London's financial trading center. The artistic attraction to this staccato, acronymistic, elliptical Cityspeak is matched only by our society's fascination with the crimes of insider dealing, share price manipulation and fraud. From paperback bestsellers on Boeksy and Guinness to Oliver Stone's film Wall Street to recent episodes of Steven Bochco's LA Law, literary and dramatic representations of this financial circus abound. But among such works, Caryl Churchill's play, Serious Money, offers the most provocative, creative, and devastating portrait of high finance.

Much critical interest in this play stems directly from Churchill's staging of the financial world. However, her subtitle, "A City Comedy," indicates that she is equally concerned with the genre context of her work. Serious Money succeeds as a drama mat expands our understanding of the genre of post-modernist comedy; a simple story of crime is transformed by inversions and subversions of time, character, and language into an elaborate post-modernist exposé of duplicity and corruption among the international financial elite.

Serious Money offers murder, mystery, and mayhem during Scilla Todd's pursuit of the murderers of her brother, Jake Todd. Scilla "works on the floor of LIFFE, the London International Financial Futures Exchange" where "trading options and futures looks tricky if you don't understand it. But if you're good at market timing you can make out like a bandit." Despite her aristocratic background Scilla is one of the new breed, an OINK (one income no kids) concerned with the passion and excitement of making "serious money".

I found O levels weren't much use, the best qualified
  people are street traders.
But I love it because it's like playing a cross between
  roulette and space invaders.

While Scilla has been enjoying her pit work, her brother Jake, a commercial paper dealer, has entangled himself in the insider trading schemes of MaryLou Baines, an American arbitrageur. Jake is further enmeshed in the machinations of Zac Zackerman (an American banker with the firm of Klein Merrick), Billy Corman (a corporate raider whose newest target is the British firm, Albion), and Jacinta Condor (a Peruvian businesswoman, looking for new ways to improve on her Eurobond investments). Unfortunately for Jake, the Department of British Trade and Industry (DTI) has begun an investigation of these dealings at the behest of Frosby, a disenfranchised old-school jobber bent on revenge against the entire Todd family.

While the play rejects any formal chronology and plotting, the two principal schemes—Jake's murder and Corman's takeover of Albion—provide the mystery. As the DTI investigation proceeds, Jake's greed and nervousness increases until the government arranges his demise: the Tories simply cannot afford to have their involvement in insider trading schemes revealed. Jake's partners in these schemes, Jacinta Condor, MaryLou Baines, and Zac Zackerman are also involved in Billy Corman's takeover of Albion Enterprises. Despite elaborate maneuvering on the Paper and the Commodies exchanges, blackmail attempts, and a glitzy media campaign, Corman's takeover bid is rejected by the government and the conspirators are forced to pursue other projects. At the play's conclusion, Scilla has given up on the quest for her brother's killer, and moved to New York where "she has been named by Business Week as Wall Street's rising star." Zac and Jacinta have married and are pursuing projects in Shanghai; Corman joins the Peerage and organizes the "Channel tunnel campaign"; and MaryLou Baines runs for US President in 1996. The play ends with the promise of "five more glorious years" hailed by the entire cast rockin' to the beat of Ian Drury.

As an exposé of corruption in the financial and political world, Churchill's drama owes less to the Jacobean tradition of mercantile comedy set within the geographical boundaries of the City of London and more to the post-Restoration comedy of manners. As David Hirst has indicated [in his Comedy of Manners (1979)], comedy of manners centers on "sexual and monetary acquisitiveness tempered by a refined yet subtle wit and a flair for intrigue." It is also the genre most likely to "subordinate the artificiality of conventional moral standards to a re-establishment of decorum and propriety, and to an astute and agile dissection of each society's rules of the game."

This is not to suggest that Churchill's comedy of manners favors game over earnestness, style over truthful expression. Quite the contrary. In a playworld where insider trading is practiced by regulatory bodies such as the DTI and the Cabinet, the rules of the game are that there are no rules, only the game. Churchill frequently argues that only in comedy of manners does one find the appropriate blend of humor and suffering, experience and instinct, necessary for dramatic creation. In a recent interview focusing on her play, Softcops, Churchill spoke directly to this issue:

I don't think I set out to be funny. Things that end up being serious or being funny I set about in exactly the same way. … We rehearsed the seriousness of the relationships and it all became terribly sad … and the whole thing became quite painful. Then we put together the sequence of truthfully played love stories and it all became very funny again and the more funny for being done for real.

Serious Money displays this intersection of humor and pain in its integration of Jake's murder-suicide and the financial machinations of the dealers, raiders and arbitrageurs of High City finance.

If Churchill draws on the "serious fun" possible in this comic genre, she also acknowledges that genre's traditions in the opening sequence of Serious Money. Here, in this 1987 drama, we encounter a scene from Thomas Shadwell's 1662 play, The Stockjobbers. As with Cloud Nine, Top Girls, and Softcops, Serious Money's first illusions are created by historical allusion. Shadwell's comedy of manners explored the newest Restoration obsession—the buying and selling of patent shares. It offered its period audience a glimpse of the power to be had in the financial institutions of the seventeenth-century City. Serious Money picks up on this theme. With the completion of The Stockjobber's scene, played on the apron in front of the main curtain, that curtain opens to reveal the trading floors, phones and computer terminals of a contemporary London financial center. Here the power introduced in a seventeenth-century playworld is reenacted in a modern one.

By transforming a Restoration comedy of manners to a post-modernist comedy of manners, Churchill places her own work in the theatrical tradition which examines the codes and games of society. In Serious Money, she reinforces the importance of the financial world to our contemporary society. It is not by chance that the protagonist of Serious Money works as a dealer on the floor of LIFFE.

It is also true that in selecting a Restoration model that calls attention to a group, a gestalt of stockjobbers, rather than a specific character, Churchill establishes a dramatic precedent which emphasizes the dynamics of group behavior over that of selected individuals. In her study of feminist theatre [Feminist Theater (1984)], Helene Keyssar points out that Churchill's predilection for workshopped productions stems from a concern for the history of the many, the ordinary citizenry. Drawing on this community of experience, Churchill strives to "revise the history of the past and the present, to make a new kind of history—of both theatre and society—appear not just possible, but necessary."

Written for production during an election year that saw Maggie Thatcher succeed to a third term as Prime Minister, Serious Money explores the relationship between the Big Bang power of the City's financial institutions and the Conservative Party platform. From the "Futures Song" of Act One to "Five More Glorious Years" which ends the play, Churchill presents a conservative government up to its eyeballs in insider deals and financial trading schemes. The DTI investigates Corman's takeover of Albion because such "raiding" of a traditional British firm looks bad on election eve.

The game must be protected.
You can go on playing after we're elected.
Five more glorious years free enterprise
And your services to industry will be recognized.

And in a clever exchange between Corman and Gleason, a Cabinet minister, (during the interval at a National Theatre production of King Lear), we learn that the government will forbid Corman's takeover of Albion.

A takeover like this in the present climate
Makes you, and the City, and us look greedy.
Help us be seen to care abut the needy.

Mr. Corman, I'll be brutally frank.
A scandal would not be welcomed by the Bank.
Nor will it be tolerated by the Tories.

Corman accepts the minister's plan and ends the play with a peerage and a seat on the National Theatre's Board.

This alliance of economics and politics is seen in the government's involvement in Jake Todd's murder and in the takeover war between Albion and Corman Enterprises. But Churchill's interest in the dominance of this alliance doesn't stop here. The play's one sexual scene, between Zackerman, and Peruvian businesswoman, Jacinta Condor, shows the two characters, filofaxes in hand unable to arrange a rendezvous because of their crowded business calendars. By the time they are finally able to connect, the financial schemes with Corman have soured and Zackerman has lost serious money. In the following exchange, the two indicate the relative value of money and sex.

Zac: Jacinta, I still can't forgive you for going to
  Biddulph, the whole deal could have been wrecked.

Jac: But I get more money that way, Zac, really what
  do you expect?
I can't do bad business just because I feel romantic.

Zac: The way you do business, Jacinta, drives me
  completely frantic.

Zac: I thought we'd never manage to make a date.
You're more of a thrill than a changing interest rate.

Jac: I am very happy. My feeling for you is deep.
But will you mind very much if we go to sleep?

In this modern high stakes world, sexual interest and ability are subordinate to financial acumen. Gamesmanship in a modern comedy of manners is of the boardroom, not the bedroom.

For all characters in Serious Money, financial activities take precedence. Unable, or unwilling to separate other desires and experience from financial concerns, each character judges the world in financial equivalents. Terry equates hitmen with corporate raiders. Jacinta equates hospitals for the poor with under-the-table payments. And Greville Todd, Jake's father, sees world events in terms of financial success or failure.

When an oil tanker sank with a hundred men, the
  lads cheered because they'd made a million.
When Sadat was shot I was rather cuffed because
  I was long on gold bullion.

To emphasize the dominance of economic concerns, Churchill changes our understanding and expectations regarding time, character, and language in favor of the new forms she offers in her comedy of manners. She begins Serious Money by conflating 1662 and 1987 London. Each setting contains appropriate costumes and languages, yet Churchill offers no explanation for a shift from one scene to the next. No logic can account for this three-century shift, and there is no internal acknowledgement that such a shift has occurred. Time ceases to be order or progression. In place of chronology and "fact", we are offered repetition and what Roger Caillois has defined as the fantastic—"A break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible with changeless everyday legality" [quoted by Tzvetan Todorov in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1975)].

This new illegality of time is accentuated by the play's second scene which calls for "three different dealing rooms simultaneously. All have screens and phones." For ten minutes of stage time, we watch the Paper, Shares, and Commodities exchanges erupt in a fast-paced bombardment of action and sound. There is neither conventional chronology nor formal plot. There is only a mass of color, linguistic bedlam, and flying paper note-cards. The NOW of history is expanded to a universal—all times enacted altogether in an ever present moment—a perverse form of realism. At this point, the audience often feels dislocated.

Having dislocated our concept of the present, Churchill moves on to completely disrupt all standard notions of time. For the remainder of the play, the chronological sequence of cause and effect will be shattered by an interplay of past, present, and future events. For example, the scene in which Scilla, Jake, their father and Zackerman meet for a horse-back-riding party is quickly followed by a scene in which Scilla reveals her shock at Jake's death. Both scenes are preceded by Jake's negotiations with MaryLou Baines and the three scenes are immediately followed by Jake and Scilla's meeting for coffee before the New York deal is set. The "when," just like the "how," of Jake's death is omitted. Only events of financial wheeling and dealing become focal points in this play's plotline. Since each deal is a repetition of every other, when one occurs is of little consequence. Jake's death, rather than functioning as a major plot component, becomes only an element of yet another deal. "When" and "i f are only important in a playworld which anticipates a future. Here, Futures are traded like anything else.

Besides shattering our perception of time, Churchill revises our expectation of character. As with all her recent plays, from Cloud Nine to Serious Money, Churchill creates a fluidity and flexibility in character. In the course of each drama, every actor plays a number of roles so that multiplicity in identity is enhanced. In Serious Money, this character variety shows us the depth of financial corruption and gamesplaying—the duplicity in the City is mirrored in the duplicity of character.

The same actress plays both Scilla Todd and Ms. Biddulph, the White Knight savior of Albion. Both characters begin as liberated women and able professionals. Yet both are quickly corrupted by the system—Scilla sells out for a position in the New York firm of Marylou Baines and Biddulph sells out for control of Albion and profits in ITV. Similar duplicity is revealed in other character combinations—Grimes, a streetsmart gilt trader, gets to wheel and deal as Corman, the corporate raider. Jake Todd, the victim and highstakes player, reappears as Grevett, the DTI inspector responsible for Todd's murder. Only Zackerman remains a single role; he is the only player in this financial game who has actively participated in machinations from the beginning of the play. He is the only character who has nothing to learn about the game.

Finally, in her treatment of language, Churchill demonstrates the range of her transformed comedy of manners. Serious Money is composed entirely of verse. Yet while the tradition of linguistic decorum appears to surrender to the diction—slang, profanity, ellipsis—it is re-established by the verse structure and end-rhyme. The rhyming slang is brought to full power in the "Futures Song" and "Five More Glorious Years," in which the driving rock-and-roll beat enhances the monosyllabic exclamatory chorus. "Out you cunt! Out in! Oh fuck it!" It also has a tendency to make the audience think twice about the lines just heard.

When employed at a more sophisticated diction level, this recalls the "wit" which constituted an essential element in traditional comedies of manners. Such wit, [according to Hirst], frequently relies on sexual innuendo, rapidfire stychymythic exchanges, puns, and specialized vocabulary. Serious Money's wit displays similar components. In fact, the compact, quick-tempoed codified language of City-speak presents numerous difficulties for the audience. The tempo Churchill creates in her works—a sort of punching bag, cartoonesque delivery—when coupled with British slang or dialect makes the playworld's language hard to follow. With an added dimension of Cityspeak vocabulary, one can find it difficult to understand this play, even text in hand.

In addition to such linguistic stylization and complication, Churchill employs overlapping dialogue. Throughout Serious Money, characters engage in simultaneous speech, interruptive speech and intersecting speech. In the first instance, characters begin to speak at precisely the same moment, and continue on with their lines despite other speakers. Thus, the following exchange occurs as if it were a single line.

Dave: I've got a certain winner for the 3:30 if
anyone is interested.

Brian: YOU haven't paid us yesterday's winnings yet.

Kathy: Come on gilts. 2 at 4, the gilts.

In the second case one character begins a new line before another character had finished speaking (/), and again both continue without an increase in volume or tempo.

Jake: NO it's just … I'm in a spot of brother with
  the authorities / but it's no problem, I'm sorting it
  out.

Scilla: What have you done?

And in the final instance, characters begin one conversation which is then interrupted by another exchange. Despite that interruption, when the character's conversation resumes, s/he picks up the idea where s/he left off (*), as if the intermittent dialogue had never ocurred.

Brian: How much would it cost to shoot her through the
head?*

Terry: YOU can't get rid of your money in Crete hire
every speedboat, drink till you pass out, eat

Till you puke and you're still loaded with drachs.

Brian: *And he says five grand.

By subverting the traditional theatrical conventions of logical dialogue, Churchill forces the audience to be an active participant in her post-modern comedy of manners. The audience must make its own choice—selecting one exchange over another, questioning each character as s/he questions every other. Through disruptive yet intriguing linguistic constructs, Churchill forces the text and the performance to assault what Julia Kristeva calls "reason's archaic and repressive structures which include order, normalcy, normative classical psychological-tending discourse." Kristeva goes on to refer to this form of post-modern art as attacking the fascist ideology of traditional western discourse ["The Speaking Subject," in On Signs, edited by Marshall Blonsky (1985)]. By denying us the stability, the clarity, and the directed vision of a traditional text and performance, Churchill forces us to examine our assumptions and attitudes about political and economic behavior within our culture.