The Young Vic is not only the proud possessor of a rebuilt and developed mainhouse auditorium but also of a new studio theatre-space. The Maria, named in memory of that outstanding opera and play designer Maria Bjornson, is now unveiled.
Candidly, it is nothing to shout about, being a rough and ready studio whose notable aspect is its flexibility. The numberless benches, into which fringe audiences are traditionally squashed seem not unduly comfortable either.
Dennis Kelly's Love and Money, which won golden opinions when premiered at Manchester's Royal Exchange Studio in October, deals with a young, debt-laden couple, David and Jess, whose lives are rent asunder thanks to Jess's shopping and David's lust for a silver Audi.
Kelly, though, sets his sights higher than the writing of yet another domestic soap opera. The couple's consumerist desires serve to challenge the notion that economic growth should be the eternal quest of nations.
While giving an ingenious thematic and structural twist to the notion that money cannot buy you happiness, Kelly subversively implies that to seek psychological well-being rather than endless consumer goods might be a better way forward. The play itself follows no chronological or single narrative line, but is comparable to a jigsaw puzzle, not all of whose pieces quite fit together.
Anna Fleischle's set design, which consists of two walls, each composed of box-like sections that open up to disgorge the odd prop, emphasises the play's non place-specific, coldly business-like atmosphere. David, something small in a telecommunications world of sales targets, is first seen sending and receiving emails from the French girl for whom he has fallen. The flirtation abruptly ends with his confession of a greedy, financial imperative that encouraged him to bring about the demise of Kellie Bright's suicidal Jess.
This dense, complex, tragi-comedy then voyages into the heart of materialism's darkness: here everything from a strange incantatory chorus on mammon's lure and a monument honouring a dead woman, to the proposal of Claudie Blakley's flirtatious businesswoman that John Kirk's amoral David consider becoming a male prostitute, is governed by the hard drive to money, love and sex. Kelly's narrative tends to take off at obscure tangents, diluting the force of the main dramatic line, but in Matthew Dunster's stylish production Love and Money offers food for uncomfortable thoughts.
Until 16 December (020 7928 6363)
Love And Money
Young Vic, The Maria Theatre
The Cut, SE1 8LL
