A Serious City Comedy: Fe-/Male History and Value Judgments in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money

A Serious City Comedy: Fe-/Male History and Value Judgments in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money KLAUS PETER MULLER Caryl Churchill's recent play, Serious Money, has been a great success both with the supporters of the City of London and those who are highly critical of the financial world. Financiers, brokers, jobbers and arbitrageurs came in droves to gleefully watch their life presented on the stages of, first, the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea and then the Wyndham Theatre in the West End of London in 1987-88. Various newspapers and magazines have puzzled over this interesting social and theatrical phenomenon, but no satisfactory explanation for the play's broad appeal has yet been offered.' Questions have been raised concerning the audiences' responses, such as whether people are blindly dancing on a volcano, or whether we are confronted with a postmodernist variety of conscious indulgence in one's own sins. Perhaps, however, the playwright is just doing her traditional job by putting the shortcomings of her time and society on the stage to be mocked at and laughed about. Churchill's play is deliberately called a "City Comedy," after all, and it begins with an excerpt from Thomas Shadwell's The Volunteers, or the Stock-Jobbers of 1692.' Reviews of the play have mainly been very favourable . Neil Collins in the Daily Telegraph of July 8, 1987, for instance, said that Serious Money is " worth a pile of textbooks about how the City really works," and Frances Caimcross described the playas " a wickedly accuJate portrait of the cultural revolution which has been taking place in the City. "3 But there are also repeated statements referring to a dangerous ambiguity in the play: " its message still confuses me"; it is "stuck in some moral no-mans-land," "its moral focus is as flimsy as its central plot," " I found it frankJy incomprehensible "; " it's a piece that's all things to all wo/men.". These confusions, and the resulting criticism, can be resolved by showing how the play is linked with the tradition of the City Comedy, how its KLAUS PETER MOLLER interpretation is dependent upon one's concept of that geme and of history, and what Churchill's view of history and human society is like. Northrop Frye's distinction between comedy and satire is helpful for an evaluation of Churchill's play and the audiences' reactions. Comedy represents "the mythos of spring," where an old destructive order is replaced by a new one which is life-enhancing, fertile and positive in almost all of its aspects. Satire allows the old order to prevail. The dominating negative society is not overcome by a more idealistic new system, but it is shown to be absurd, and there are clear moral norms against which it is measured unfavourably. "Hence satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd, is reflected in its double focus of morality and fantasy. [ ... 1Two things, then, are essential to satire; one is wit or humour founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque or absurd, the other is an object of attack.'" The audiences' decision to see Serious Money either as comedy or satire may explain their different reactions towards the play. Seen as a satire, the play must provide, however indirectly, moral norms which help to formulate value-judgments on the characters and their actions. As "satire is militant irony," and as the "satirist commonly takes a high moral line,,,6 morality is obviously an important aspect for the difference between comedy and satire in contemporary definitions. It is also the distinctive feature in the differences of the present-day spectator responses. The "moral line" in Serious Money is not so easily detected, however, if it is not seen in connection with the geme, the City Comedy, and its history. The City Comedy proper was established "by about 1605" with "such plays as Jonson's Volpone, Marston's Dutch Courtezan and Middleton'S Michaelmas Term."7 Churchill's use of Shadwell makes it necessary to remember an English tradition that was already a century old in 1692. The link between the...