£10,000 in pound coins on stage at the Bush Theatre for MONEY the game show

Alice Jones' Arts Diary

MONEY the game show

The Bush Theatre has hired a bouncer and installed CCTV to police the audience at its next play.

A little heavy-handed perhaps but then MONEY the game show does include £10,000 in real pound coins among its props.

Clare Duffy’s play, which opens on 31 January, features two hedge fund managers who are forced to earn a living as performance artists following the financial collapse.

They will lead the audience through a number of games dramatising the economic crisis, including one in which two teams race to grab as many coins as possible in the time it takes to keep a soap bubble afloat.

“There’s a feeling of a children’s party, in many ways. It’s demystifying money”, says Duffy who won The Arches Platform 18 award for emerging artists in 2011. “They gave me £6,000 to make a show. Which was great but it’s just enough to hire two actors. It inspired me to think about what money is.”

The show had a 10-night run in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 2011. Now it is The Bush’s turn to wrangle with its high insurance and security costs.

At the end of the run, the £10,000 loan must be repaid to the bank in full. “The audience can’t take home any of the coins”, confirms Duffy.

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