Serious Money by Caryl Churchill

First produced: 1987, at the Royal Court Theatre, London

First published: 1987

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of work: The late 1980’s

Locale: London and New York

Principal Characters:

• Scilla Todd, a futures exchange dealer
• Jake Todd, Scilla’s brother and her conduit for insider information to a worldwide network
• “Zac” Zackerman, an American banker
• Greville Todd, the father of Jake and Scilla, a stockbroker
• Marylou Baines, an American arbitrageur
• Jacinta Condor, a Peruvian businesswoman
• Billy Corman, a corporate raider
• Duckett, the chair of Albion, a company which Corman is trying to buy

Form and Content

Churchill subtitles Serious Money “a city comedy” and introduces the play with a scene from Thomas Shadwell’s 1692 play The Volunteers: Or, The Stockjobbers. Thus, she deliberately places her play in the tradition of satiric city comedies such as Ben Jonson’s Volpone, dating back to the early seventeenth century.

The scene from Shadwell’s play depicts Hackwell, Mrs. Hackwell, and two jobbers debating the usefulness of various patents, with Hackwell repeating his assertion that the only use of any patent is “to turn the penny.” This sets up Churchill’s major assertion—that money and greed are the only motivation in this world of jobbers and dealers.

Although Churchill lists twenty characters in her dramatis personae, in a real sense the major character of Serious Money is “the City,” an international financial center inside the old city of London. The first scene following the Shadwell introduction shows three different dealing rooms in the City that clearly illustrate the effects of the “Big Bang,” a change in the mode of operations for British stockbrokers that introduced an open computerized trading system and replaced the upper class “old boy” network. The rooms, each dominated by one of the Todds, presents a realistic picture of the traders, based on Churchill’s extensive research, yet the style of presentation uses the Brechtian alienation effect, presenting familiar situations in a way that renders them strange.

The world of the City revolves around deals, and the plot of the play concerns Billy Corman’s attempt to take over the symbolically named Albion (England). The banker “Zac” Zackerman is responsible for orchestrating the deal; he also comments on the situation, providing a history of changes in the financial world that Britain is just beginning to feel and noting that “the British empire was a cartel” but that those days are past.

A short hunt scene shows the upper class to be out of touch with reality and Zac unable to function in their world—something that no longer matters. Frosby, a jobber of Greville Todd’s generation, ends this scene with a monologue lamenting stock market change and his own worthlessness, then decides to revenge himself by telling the regulatory DTI about Jake’s insider dealings.

In the following scene, Zac informs Marylou Baines of Jake’s death, but the news has little effect on business or the takeover bid. Scilla, who, in a flashback, discusses Jake’s problems with him, is certain that he is no suicide, and she begins confronting his contacts—at first hoping to discover his murderer, but, after learning about his wealth, shifting to a search for it.

The takeover bid involves Jacinta Condor and Nigel Abjibala, who prove that representatives of the Third World are as single-mindedly greedy as their British and American counterparts; a “white knight,” Ms. Biddulph, intent on “saving” Albion for her own reasons; and an intervention by Gleason, a cabinet minister, who persuades Corman to drop his takeover bid on the eve of the election to help the image of the conservative government. The loose ends of the plot are resolved in Brechtian fashion at the end by Zac’s long monologue and each character’s one-line summary of his or her fate. (For example, Scilla is “named by Business Week as Wall Street’s rising star,” and Jacinta “marries Zac next week and they honeymoon in Shanghai. [Good business to be done in China now.]”) The finale is a song celebrating the reelection of the conservative government for “five more glorious years.”

Context

While feminists acknowledge Churchill’s importance as a major dramatist, they have often been uneasy about what some have seen as her ambivalent attitude toward feminism. It is not difficult to see the reason for this. Churchill does not write from a simple position, and her female characters are not necessarily positive.

In Serious Money, many of the characters are women, and they have “made it.” Marylou Baines controls much of the action and runs for president of the United States. Scilla Todd becomes “Wall Street’s rising star.” Jacinta Condor gains tremendous financial advantage. Yet their success comes at a huge price: Marylou betrays her colleagues; Scilla forgets her brother’s cause; Jacinta betrays her country and its needy people. The women have become indistinguishable from the men in power. They know that the financial world is sexist, but they all accept the humiliation that is part of their initiation into this world. They adapt to the male model, and when they lead, they are as ruthless as the men. It is no coincidence that the ultimate insult among the traders, “You trade like a cunt,” is accepted and used by both men and women.

The behavior of her women characters reinforces Churchill’s insistence on feminism and socialism as necessarily inseparable. To escape the general oppression of the City, the system must be changed. Putting women in power positions in the old system is not enough.

However ambivalent some feminists may be about Churchill’s feminism, she is widely recognized for her important contributions to socialist feminism and to the feminist theater since the 1970’s. The broad appeal of Serious Money, which reached a wide spectrum of people, including the traders she was satirizing, assures that Churchill will be a force to be reckoned with in British theater—a strong female voice.

Bibliography

Aston, Elaine. Caryl Churchill. Plymouth, England: Northcote House, 1996.

Churchill, Caryl. “The Common Imagination and the Individual Voice.” Interview by Geraldine Cousin. New Theatre Quarterly 4, no. 13 (1988): 3-16. An interview in which Churchill discusses her feminism, her use of collaborative workshops, the Joint Stock Company, and the writing of Serious Money, noting that most of the play was written in prose before she turned to poetry.

Cousin, Geraldine. Churchill: The Playwright. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. Contains information of Churchill’s use of the workshop process, an analysis of her plays, and a summary chapter that attempts to connect shared themes in her work. A section of Serious Money discusses the workshop at the Royal Court Theatre from which Churchill got the impetus to write the play. Illustrations include a photograph from the original Royal Court Theatre production of Serious Money.

Fitzsimmons, Linda. File on Churchill. London: Methuen Drama, 1989. Contains a general introduction and a brief chronology. A comprehensive listing of plays includes unperformed ones plus a selection of reviews and Churchill’s comments on her work—excerpts from interviews on Serious Money among them. The bibliography lists selected play collections, essays, interviews, and secondary sources.

Itzin, Catherine. “Caryl Churchill.” In Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

Keyssar, Helene. “The Dramas of Caryl Churchill: The Politics of Possibility.” In Feminist Theatre: An Introduction to Plays of Contemporary British and American Women. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Kritzer, Amelia Howe. The Plays of Caryl Churchill:Theatre of Empowerment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Written from a feminist perspective, this book opens with an overview of theories of theater and drama and of feminist and socialist criticism in relation to Churchill’s drama. The chapter “Labour and Capital” analyzes Top Girls, Fen, and Serious Money as characteristic of Churchill’s concern about the socioeconomic effects of Margaret Thatcher’s government and its policies.

Muller, Klaus Peter. “A Serious City Comedy: Fe-/Male History and Value Judgments in Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money.” Modern Drama 33 (September, 1990): 347-362. An analysis of Serious Money as a “city comedy,” this article provides a history of the genre and its relationship to comedy and satire, then places the play in this context, analyzing Churchill’s use of the traditional form and detailing how she goes beyond it.

Nellhaus, Tobin. Review in Theatre Journal 42 (March, 1990): 108-110.

Rabillard, Sheila, ed. Essays on Caryl Churchill: Contemporary Representations. Winnipeg, Canada: Blizzard, 1997.

Randall, Phyllis R., ed. Caryl Churchill: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1988. This casebook features a variety of essays. The essay on Serious Money reflects on the popularity of the play’s first production. Includes an annotated bibliography of secondary sources.