Love, sex and money are all the rage in DC Jackson's ribald 21st-century re-telling of Beaumarchais's 18th-century romp.
In Jackson's world, Figaro is a thrusting young banker in partnership with his on the make squeeze, Suzanne. Together they're about to merge with a top-floor firm that will make them the biggest financial institution in Scotland. To get there, the young lovers must negotiate their way around a series of compromising positions involving an even more lascivious power couple, predatory PA Margery, a cross-dressing Ukrainian office boy-toy and an overdose of Glass Ceiling perfume by Jackie Collins.
Thatcher's children are alive and kicking in Mark Thomson's production, which, while peppered with a series of trademark spiky one-liners by Jackson, also shows a new-found maturity from a writer who seems to have moved on from adolescent fumbling. If the tub-thumping anti-capitalist polemic at the end states the obvious, it feels very much of the moment.
In the main, Jackson's script allows Thomson's cast to explore the full grotesquerie of how money talks. While Mark Prendergast and Nicola Roy make a handsome couple, Molly Innes's Margery and Jamie Quinn's Pavlo provide much of the play's comic drive. It's Stuart Bowman's explosive Sir Randy who provides the play's amoral compass, his mixture of self-important pomp and unintentional ridiculousness falling somewhere between Fred Goodwin and Charles Endall Esquire, bankrupt on every level in a comedy of considerable power.
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