Outsiders

Peacock Theatre, Dublin

In one throwaway moment of David McWilliams’s lecture-cum-performance – and in 90 breathless minutes there are very few of those – he refers to economics as “the art of the possible”. That’s not quite what Otto Von Bismarck had in mind when he applied the phrase to politics, but at least it makes a change from the science of the dismal. Economics, however, has become a way of making sense of the world, explaining the past and prophesying the future. It might be more accurately called the religion of the moment.

The question the Abbey now poses, as it seeks a rapid response to the byzantine mechanisms of the financial crisis and its more brutishly simple effect, is whether art can offer an explanation. With Outsiders, a lively, provocative and personalised economics lecture delivered on an unfussy set (effectively designed by John Comiskey to resemble an abandoned construction site), the subject is addressed directly and without dramatic fiction. Fables have gone bust, the project seems to say. Allegory needs to be recapitalised.

Not that McWilliams is shy to use metaphor or simile in his argument. Nama is a kidnapping where we pay the ransom, begins his thesis on the biggest bank bailout in history. Fear, the underlying cause of a Keynesian liquidity trap, spreads like a nits epidemic, he explains as a magnified head louse appears on the elegant video display behind him. But the unembellished facts and figures he deploys in his indictment of perceived collusion between political and financial insiders – at the expense of the outsiders, or citizens who foot the bill – are more startling: the Irish debt clock that spirals towards €85 billion; the €23,000 debt that every newborn in Greece now inherits, compared with the €46,000 debt that hangs over the head of every new Irish child.

As a performer the prepossessing McWilliams initially seems nervy, taking to the stage with an opening-night surge of adrenalin that gives his informed Everyman persona a jittery energy. He visibly relaxes once he has outlined a government “borrowing from tomorrow to pay for the sins of yesterday” while easing into personal anecdotes.

He recalls his unemployed father’s shame of collecting the dole, a more moving way of personifying a crisis than his customary habit of soubriquet-coining and demographic character descriptions (although Breakfast Roll Man does make a cameo).

Director Conall Morrison carefully regulates the flow of performance, with McWilliams using his uncluttered space well to deliver a conversely dense argument. Portraying Nama as a vast conspiracy of politicians, bankers, auditors and the professional classes, the elaborations of McWilliams’s argument can be both stimulating and frustrating. A web of interconnected and compromising board memberships – the most notorious of which was between Anglo Irish Bank and Dublin Docklands Development Authority – makes the onslaught of cosy cronyism difficult to absorb in a single sitting.

McWilliams has little faith in politics – he is just as excoriating on the Government’s fear of devaluing the punt during the 1990s as he is about them keeping Anglo afloat now – but has a zealot’s belief in the market, which forgets all and forgives all. “If we want to get out of this mess, we have to think like traders,” he says at one rather worrying moment, understandably urging us to question conventional wisdom, to let Anglo fail and, more contentiously, to consider the benefits of leaving the euro.

If all economists were laid end to end, Shaw famously said, they would not reach a conclusion. But with his rhetoric now soaring, McWilliams draws the creative example of James Joyce into his final thoughts for economic recovery, equating the genius of entrepreneurialism with the ingenuity of the writer. A blur in reasoning at the end of an otherwise persuasive case, it has all the requisite uplift of a pleasing narrative but the depth of a three-card trick. It seems too glib to be the impassioned stance of a true believer, as though McWilliams finally succumbs not to the art of the possible but to the entertainment of fantasy.

Runs until July 3rd