The Great Goat Bubble

Druid Theatre, Galway ***

Certain tales grow with the telling. That seems particularly true of Julian Gough’s The Great Goat Bubble, an economic satire that began life as a short story in the Financial Times, in 2003, and has since swelled into a BBC radio play, a novel chapter (in Jude in London) and now a stage production from Fishamble: the New Play Company and Galway Arts Festival. Such unregulated growth seems apt for Gough’s absurdist parable of a market bubble, because its own value may have soared to bursting point.

Set on the platform of Ballinasloe railway station in 1986, which the designer Sabine Dargent gives a corroded, otherworldly charm, the play is also a study in storytelling in which the guileless orphan Jude (Ciarán O’Brien), waiting for the endlessly delayed 3.30pm to Dublin, tries to comprehend the abstractions of Dr Ibrahim Bihi’s tale.

“My degree is in economics,” Bihi (Wil Johnson) says by way of apology, “and it has had an unfortunate effect on my conversational English.” Precise, articulate and leaving no “r” unrolled, Johnson’s Somali economist is a breeze to understand. Having exploited a “structural discrepancy in the price of goats” in his native Hargeisa, by driving his animal into the path of a landing aircraft for double its price in compensation, he began a frenzied market bubble. Soon demand for goats became infinite, and “goat hyperinflation” set in, leading to new opportunities in goat futures and goat electronic trading. The boom seemed unlikely to ever end. You can guess the rest.

Vivid, lucid and preposterously amusing, Gough’s comic conceit invests just as heavily in one asset: substituting goats for every complexity of the marketplace. As though emulating bubble economics, his comic dividends seem for a while inexhaustible. But, just like the Hargeisa goat market, it begins to lose investor confidence, stressing its relevance to the Irish property bubble so bluntly that its satirical edge becomes dull.

That embellishment is for the stage version, but Mikel Murfi, as director, does a more subtle job of theatrical transposition. In prose we see the world through Jude’s naive eyes, whereas here we merely see him, gauche and uncomprehending with little to do. In one sweet moment, though, O’Brien is allowed to show an endearing flicker of contentment when Johnson pats him on the knee for keeping pace and it helps to humanise them both. It also mirrors the deeper purpose of both economists and storytellers, to attach meaning or real value to the worryingly abstract, moving Gough’s tale beyond 2003’s comic prophecy or what might seem like a caustic riposte in 2012: I told you.