Adelaide Fringe. Alison Bennett. The Bakehouse Theatre. 3 Mar 2017
Trade is a newish work of collaborative and physical storytelling devised by Hurrah Hurrah of Sydney. In the first half of the show, trade refers to hedge funds - you give your life savings to a bunch of young people who seem pretty smart and they offset long and short positions in financial markets and try to make you a profit. The team was inspired by a French trader who lost billions in rogue trading as a consequence of the global financial crisis of 2016.
There have been several movies on this theme - The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Big Short, and Margin Call come to mind - but I have never seen it abstracted, physicalised and satirised like this mob has done. Using only office partition frames, power dressing and financial buzzwords, Hurrah Hurrah take us into the cocaine-fueled, hubristic world of big swinging dicks, except most of them are women. Having myself been a share broker at one time, I guarantee you they have nailed it, producing a bevy of very funny physical metaphors.
Of course, the whole things crashes and the finance team morphs into an even more cynical version of the original. The creative team successfully tackles the issues of responsibility, yet shows that greed has no bounds and our vigilance against these vultures cannot end, because really, nothing has changed. A definite go see.
David Grybowski
When: 27 Feb to 4 Mar
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
