Bullyache's A Good Man Is Hard to Find: A Grim Gameshow for Banking Bros
Masterful atmospherics define Bullyache's latest dance-theatre piece, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, now playing at Sadler's Wells East in London. The creative duo Courtney Deyn and Jacob Samuel, along with five dancers, conjure a bleak world of excess, ritual, and power in a visually striking but limited production.
The scene is like the aftermath of the darkest office party: a giant boardroom table, a naked man on the floor, another with his suit trousers around his ankles, and someone urinating into a whisky glass. What follows is a surreal, less glossy version of the TV show Industry, with menacing games of power and domination in a coldly lit, hollow space. A cleaner arrives to mop up bodily fluids and sings Ave Maria, adding to the unpredictability.
The set by Tor Studio features a wall of broken glass, as if a truck has driven through it, but the piece is actually about those who drove a truck through the global economy in 2008. Halfway through, in a sudden mood shift, it becomes a gameshow, revealing that the wasted cretins are the bankers who caused the financial crisis. Their fate hangs in the balance.
Inspired by the secretive Bohemian Club in San Francisco, where powerful men engage in rituals like the cremation of care, the piece includes a Rite of Spring-ish ritual set to Shostakovich's chamber symphony in C minor. The grim mood is punctuated by classical leaps, Latin American swivel, punchy folk dance, and quasi-religious imagery.
While the atmosphere-making is masterful, with Bullyache's own music featuring cranium-shaking soundscapes and songs of pain and loneliness, the piece falls short politically. It offers stories of these men but stays too much on the surface, along the lines of “big bankers bad.” Extra detail would make it more powerful: Are they specific people? What are their stories? What are the ramifications 18 years on? If you aim to be political, make it sting.
Despite its brilliant ambition, the show reaches for something bigger but doesn't fully deliver. At Sadler's Wells East until 9 May.
