From Oliver Stone’s ‘Wall Street’ to Caryl Churchill’s ‘Serious Money’, the late ‘80s was a boom time for dramas about awful people buying shares in things. It was also prompted by relative novelty: the deregulation of financial markets in the middle of the decade had ushered in a golden era of hostile takeovers and greed-is-good ethics.
A 1989 off-Broadway hit that was turned into a (watered down) 1991 film starring Danny DeVito, Jerry Sterner’s ‘Other People’s Money’ isn’t necessarily dated thematically, but feels of its time. That’s for a number of reasons, notably its fascination with an antagonist, Wall Street corporate raider protagonist Larry The Liquidator (Rob Locke), who now feels like a well-worn trope. Still, Katharine Farmer’s production papers over the cracks with breakneck pace and a great cast.
The New England Wire & Cable Company is a struggling but surviving company that’s the major employer in a small New England town. Run by the benignly anachronistic Jorgy (Michael Brandon) for the last 38 years, Larry has identified it as ripe for a takeover and asset-stripping. So Jorgy’s assistant Bea (Lin Blakley) contacts her hotshot lawyer daughter Kate (Amy Burke), who is duly persuaded to marshall a defence against the voracious Larry.
It all pings around very nicely, in large part thanks to gleefully committed performances from Locke and Burke as two notional opponents who clearly enjoy the fight more than they care about their actual causes. It’s just a shame Sterner’s script sullies their chemistry via some grimly misogynist stuff whereby Larry repeatedly bores on to Kate how much he wants to bang her.
Generally, the play is better at the money than the people: any time it tried to explore the characters’ relationships with each other in greater depth, I really wished it hadn’t (Kate’s relationship with her mother is so poorly drawn I struggled to see why it was necessary to portray the characters’ relatives at all).
If ‘Other People’s Money’ was a company, somebody would probably have bought it and dissolved it. Fortunately, the theatre world is more sentimental: this dated period piece is still pretty entertaining.