One of my favourite David Hare quotes goes, ‘People say in that demeaning way, oh, you’re a political playwright. And it makes it sound as if that means that you write about politics all the time. But you don’t. You write with a certain view and that view is that history affects human beings as much as biology. I’ve always written plays in which social and historical forces are blowing through the room and affecting how people feel and think. This is what I crudely call the Shakespearean approach to playwriting’.

Amongst the subjects Hare has tackled in the past include British Rail- ‘The ‘Permanent Way’, the British Labor Party- ‘Gethsemane’, the American invasion of Iraq in ‘The Vertical Hour’ and ‘Stuff Happens’. ‘The Power Of Yes’, Hare’s new play upstairs at Belvoir Street, sees him tackle the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) that rocked the world back in September 2008.

Hare has stated that the driving force behind his writing ‘The Power Of Yes’ was, ‘that it’s democratically important that we understand what happened. Bankers, financiers and money people are relying on our confusion and ignorance in order to go back to their old corrupt ways…They have a vested interest in pretending nothing happened. But something did. The purpose of ‘The Power Of Yes’ is to show you what that something was’.

Hare writes ‘The Power Of Yes’ in a compelling way. The tag-line to the play is ‘A dramatist seeks to understand the financial crisis’. Autobiographical in nature, Hare makes himself the main character in the play, and the play is about his determination, as a man mainly ignorant of financial matters, to get a handle on what happened with the GFC and to communicate the issues to audiences.

The play sees him seek the counsel and pick the brain of a well informed young Serbian woman Masa Serdarevic (Amber McMahon) who worked for the Lehman Brothers until its collapse. The play is composed of ‘tutorials’ he has with Masa along with the bulk of the play consisting of the real players from that time, including banking, financiers and government officials, walking in and off the stage and giving their takes on events as they unfolded.

Hare’s play draws a picture of a financial world gone out of control. There’s a quote from the play, ‘Courage works when greed and fear are in the correct balance. This time they got out of balance. Too much greed, not enough fear’. Many of the main financial players knew that things such as the sub-prime mortgages weren’t right but everyone was making money and ‘as long as the music is playing you have to get up and dance!’ When the crash did come, as George Soros says late in the play, ‘it was the ordinary people that paid the price and not those who had been reaping benefits’.

With this production, director Sam Strong and a large cast match the playwright’s determination to clear the smokescreen, to commit to the herculean task of trying to get work out the GFC in less than two hours of stage time. Strong’s clear production is matched by the casts strong performances.

The leads were great with Brian Lipson as the author and Amber McMahon as Masa Serdarevic. Amber delivered one of the plays’ most memorable lines, ‘At one time all you had to do was breathe for the bank to give you a mortgage.

A strong supporting cast included John Derum, Russell Kiefel, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, Christopher Stollery and Marshall Napier. Dale Ferguson’s set with the stage floor overflowing with empty balloons of every colour was a fitting metaphor for a boom financial party of 17 years standing that crashed suddenly.

Sam Strong’s fine production of David Hare’s ‘The Power Of Yes’ plays upstairs at Belvoir Street until Sunday 30th May.