Saskia Solomons’s highly stylised show about money is very much a performance in need of an audience.
Dressed in a golden body-hugging tunic, designed by the Italian tailor Antoinetta Gambino, with a bodice containing a distended belly, and sporting a burgundy-coloured dressing gown and a cutout crown, the self-described “closet rich kid” from West Yorkshire gives a manically clownish performance as she morphs into four inner personalities grappling with the dynamics of dough.
On the opening day of her Edinburgh debut solo run, there was a five-strong audience, which was just about enough as three volunteers were required on stage to represent the different levels of wealth in Britain. A succession of golden balls were then funnelled into coloured cardboard containers in front of them, with a handful for the poorest and an overflowing number for the wealthiest.
Solomons, 36, who trained at the since-closed London International School of Performing Arts and is now partly based in Italy, speaks in an exaggeratedly posh royal accent as her principal persona before tonally plunging into her inner cynic’s miserable timbre or wildly screwing up her face in terror as her fearful one. All the while, she contorts her body into excruciatingly awkward shapes, flinging and thrusting her limbs every which way in a preposterous display of tomfoolery. It’s exceedingly silly, if a little light on free-flowing humour.
Yet class and inequality are serious subjects and the awkwardness of her characters is perhaps a reflection of the awkwardness people feel when talking about money. The main point Solomons wants to convey is that the wealth disparity between the rich and the rest has increased much more over the past 50 years than the disparity in income and that the higher-ups need to do more to help those lower down the scale.
So what better way to solve the nation’s financial problems than by getting the audience to play a game of “all-party parliamentary group proposals for solutions to inequality bingo” in a parody of the all-party parliamentary group on inclusive growth?
And in the true spirit of the show, the winner – whose crosses included “eliminate zero-hours contracts” and “annual tax on net wealth above £10 million” – nobly shared his huge prize bar of Cadbury dairy milk chocolate with your reviewer.
