About Money
Summerhall Summerhall, Edinburgh
 

WERE every one of McDonald’s 130,000 workers to go on strike for fair pay, fair rotas and fair contracts the effect would be to transform not just the British workforce, but a global workforce.

The movement McStrike, which is supported by Unite and the BFAWU (Bakers, Food and Allied Workers’ Union) aims to achieve exactly this goal, and the piecemeal actions that began in 2017 and continued in 2019 and 2020 are demonstrations of this potential given widespread union involvement in the industry.

The corporation, on the other hand, requires a workforce that lives in desperate circumstances to maintain low wages, high profits and zero-hours contracts.

Eliza Gearty’s new play About Money aims to dramatise the situations faced by those for whom such work is the only option, and the absence of collective consciousness among them.

In Sean, given a heartfelt performance by Micheal McCardie, Gearty has created the problem character at the centre of the dispute. An 18-year-old, he cares for his eight-year-old sister and lives in terror of social services who will see the inadequacy of his efforts.

The play doesn’t explain why he has found himself in this situation (where are his parents?) but you are able to take it on trust – there are many documented instances of carers making ends meet on meagre wages.

When he meets another worker, Hannah, played with provocative chutzpah by Isabele De Rosa, she – a visitor from the militant south of England – suggests that he join the union. Sean has no concept of a union, and to curry favour with his bullying boss, snitches on her.

Hannah is fired and Sean gets an extra 20p on his wages, but no chance to choose his shift, which is the only prize that he craves to make sense of his responsibilities.

Meanwhile the kid has taken it into her own head to slay the monstrous manager like the fairytale prince that slays the Jabberwocky. She gets as far as the street corner before she is whisked into care.

You have to admire Gearty for choosing to dramatise this forgotten area of society, and for examining the well-meaning but compromised men to be found there. She has a convincing way with dialogue and an ear for Glasgow patter.

But the drama reads more like the pilot episode in a TV series than a fully fledged drama, and the stories are left hanging.

The Edinburgh Festival is at its best as the crucible for new writing and this play falls squarely into that zone. Like the strike itself, it has potential, but where will it go?

You can imagine a six-part drama that follows a dawning political consciousness in the mind of its anti-hero where love leads the way to maturity and activism.

Or you can imagine a substantial play that crushes him, but reveals the issues in starker clarity.

Which will it be?

Until August 28 2022. Box office: 0131 226 0000, tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/about-money