If You Don't Let Us Dream, We Won't Let You Sleep

Synopsis

"I believe that open markets and free enterprise are the best imaginable force for improving human wealth and happiness. And I would go further: where they work properly, they can actually promote morality." David Cameron, Jan 2012. As the financial world issues its shock treatment, what happens when the City's agenda is taken to its ultimate conclusion? Anders Lustgarten's passionately argued play explodes the ethos of austerity and offers an alternative.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 21 February 2013

Well, it makes a change: a flat-out protest play that recalls the days of 1970s agitprop so cosily referenced in the musical Billy Elliot. Performed on a bare, scaffolded stage, and written by a 36 year-old career activist, Anders Lustgarten, the play starts with a group of do-gooding capitalists working out how best to rip off the social services by issuing Unity bonds. Up the workers!

Lustgarten, the son of American academics who took a degree in Chinese Studies at Oxford, and who came to attention with a couple of plays at the Finborough, has thought long and deep about public services and political responsibility, and it would be wrong to dismiss this eighty-minute, cleverly interwoven “tirade” as self-indulgent liberalism. It’s not woolly and it’s not cheaply anarchi...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 8 March 2013:

I read an interview with Anders Lustgarten where he expressed some idiotic views about theatre so it was no surprise that his play should suffer from unsupported polemic, factual inaccuracies, prejudices without any semblance of balance and the fatuous belief that if every country ignored its debt mountain it would just go away. Unusually for agitprop theatre there are snatches of humour and even hints of self-deprecation and a mostly excellent cast do their best with sketchy characterisations. As a piece of drama though it doesn't hang together, most obviously at the end which seems to be just the finish of a first half. Surely someone at the Royal Court could have seen beyond their own prejudices to have realised that it feels unfinished and should have been sent back for much more work before putting it on upstairs, if at all. 2 stars is very generous as at least it wasn't quite as bad as I had expected....

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