BWW Reviews: CREDITORS, Brockley Jack Theatre, March 26 2015

Quantitative easing sounds like a chapter in an Economics textbook - and I'm sure that is exactly as intended - nevertheless that anodyne phrase meant that ATMs were re-stocked with cash and no more queues formed outside banks. The last decade's financial crisis is ever more distant, but its impact is felt still today.

But what if Gordon Brown had decided that "you can't buck the market"? How long would civil society have remained civil with no cash to buy food, all credit cards declined and no money available to pay wages? That nightmarish scenario is the backdrop for Neil Smith's adaptation of August Strindberg's Creditors (continuing at the Brockley Jack Theatre until 11 April).

While society disintegrates outside, two men talk in a hotel lobby, the only guests in town. Adolph is highly strung, a painter who has shifted to sculpture, but can barely shape his own life, never mind the representation of a wife whom he adores, but who has temporarily deserted him after a tiff. Gustav is... what? A psychiatrist? A friend? A rival? He talks to Adolph, but is he helping him out of his psychosis or pushing him further into it? Tekla lusts after her husband, but Adolph is intimidated by her success and her voracious sexual appetite - and what's her connection to Gustav?

Tice Oakfield makes us pity his Adolph as he twists and turns (mentally and physically) trying to please Paul Trussell's mad-eyed Gustav and hold on to his art - the only thing he can cling to in the absence of his wife. Rachel Heaton (rather an apt name for the part) delivers an alpha-female in a designer outfit, but one whose attention never seems to rest in one place long enough to make a difference. All three performances are strong, as they circle each other, waiting for one character to blink first. They don't speak like real people, but we believe in them because their emotions are recognised, if exaggerated.

At 80 minutes all-through in the black box of the Brockley Jack Theatre, this dark comedy is an intense examination of desire and insecurity. How much to give away? And how much to demand in return? Such is the calculus of finance - and of love.

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