Serious Money Analysis

Serious Money begins with a brief scene from Thomas Shadwell’s The Volunteers: Or, The Stock Jobbers (pr. 1692), in which the goal of investing is shown to be “turning the penny,” regardless of the project or its legality.

On the floor of LIFFE (the London International Financial Futures Exchange), many traders shout their transactions simultaneously, with increasingly furious energy. After work, traders Scilla and Grimes, and Scilla’s brother Jake, over drinks, agree that the market is so overcrowded that only those as aggressive as themselves will survive.

The narrator, an American banker named Zackerman, who provides continuity between the rapid scene shifts, also realizes that the money-dealing world has become cutthroat. A flashback to Zackerman’s New York employer shows how, in an idle conversation, one executive officer dismisses another. Since there has been deregulation of the exchange in England, Zac (as he is known) observes that such Wall Street scenes will now occur in the City, the trading district of London.

At the country home of Scilla’s father, after Scilla, Zac, and others set off on a hunt, Frosby, an old family friend, embittered about losing his trader job, vows to call the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI, the securities investigative unit) about Jake.

Abruptly, Zac telephones Marylou Baines in New York, telling her that Jake is dead, perhaps through a suicide. In various overlapping telephone calls, Zac, investors Jacinta Condor and Nigel Ajibala, and corporate raider Corman consult on appropriate moves to protect themselves. Zac reports that he went to identify the body with Scilla, who reveals that she thinks Jake was murdered and vows to find the murderer. She begins her investigation with her father, who denies any knowledge of Jake’s doings.

Meanwhile, Zac reports to Corman, who is involved in several takeover attempts, including that of Albion. Two flashback scenes show Corman with his associates planning these takeovers. Corman suggests that Marylou Baines might want to buy Albion shares, too, whereupon Zac notifies Jake.

Subsequently, in New York, Marylou and her assistant discuss buying Albion stock. At Albion, the chairman discusses with his white knight (a rescuer of takeover targets) a public relations strategy to fight off the now-obvious takeover attempt. Needing still more shares, Corman orders Etherington and Zac to use any tactic necessary to get them. Corman telephones Marylou, only to learn that she has sold her Albion stock. Furious, Corman threatens her, but, recognizing that the deal cannot be made without her help, calls her back to apologize. Meantime, Scilla has arrived, unnoticed, and has overheard the conversation, including Corman’s statement that Jake was “one of mine.” Blindly, she accuses Corman of Jake’s...

Serious Money, like many of Caryl Churchill’s plays, developed from a workshop. Churchill, director Max Stafford-Clark, and the actors researched and observed brokerage firms and trading floors; based on their discussions, Churchill alone wrote the script. The workshop method promotes a unity, a seamlessness between script and performance that leads to impressive productions.

Churchill’s allusions to contemporary events add an air of realism to her fictitious ones. Frosby mentions “Big Bang,” as deregulation was popularly known. Marylou alludes to Ivan Boesky’s “insider” deal with the United States government to unload his billion shares before his arrest was announced—a reference to the Wall Street scandal of 1986. Referring to the scandal in England the previous year, both Zac and Etherington remind Corman of the legal trouble in which the Guinness brewery became mired because of its takeover schemes. Moreover, in Great Britain and the United States, the Thatcher and Reagan governments were generally considered to favor the rich, while programs for the poor were curtailed. Connecting the adventures of greedy Corman’s takeover bid with the election was also topical.

To maintain some distance between the events of the play and the audience, Churchill uses many Brechtian devices: numerous scenes, a narrator, a nonchronological plot, and occasional songs. Moreover, the plot is minimal, the character development nil, so...

Churchill subtitles Serious Money “a city comedy” and introduces the play with a scene from Thomas Shadwell’s 1692 play The Volunteers: Or, The Stockjobbers. Thus, she deliberately places her play in the tradition of satiric city comedies such as Ben Jonson’s Volpone, dating back to the early seventeenth century.

The scene from Shadwell’s play depicts Hackwell, Mrs. Hackwell, and two jobbers debating the usefulness of various patents, with Hackwell repeating his assertion that the only use of any patent is “to turn the penny.” This sets up Churchill’s major assertion—that money and greed are the only motivation in this world of jobbers and dealers.

Although Churchill lists twenty characters in her dramatis personae, in a real sense the major character of Serious Money is “the City,” an international financial center inside the old city of London. The first scene following the Shadwell introduction shows three different dealing rooms in the City that clearly illustrate the effects of the “Big Bang,” a change in the mode of operations for British stockbrokers that introduced an open computerized trading system and replaced the upper class “old boy” network. The rooms, each dominated by one of the Todds, presents a realistic picture of the traders, based on Churchill’s extensive research, yet the style of presentation uses the Brechtian alienation effect, presenting...