Some of Dennis Kelly’s plays I have loved (Taking Care Of Baby, say, or his book for the musical of Matilda), some have infuriated me (his adaptation of Kleist’s The Prince Of Homburg). I have always, however, seen the point of a given piece. Until now: for his latest work strikes me as a pretty long journey to nowhere in particular.
    
Vicky Featherstone’s first main-show since taking the helm at the Royal Court begins with an allusion to their shared history. The seven members of the cast sit on stacking chairs in a row across the stage, recalling Featherstone’s 1998 première staging (for Paines Plough, and presented when the Court was temporarily at a different address) of Sarah Kane’s Crave. Unlike Kane’s quartet, however, this septet begin to interact with each other – a coy look, a questioning intonation – as they narrate the early years of Gorge (consistently pronounced simply “George”) Mastromas, the crucial decisions he has taken and whether each has been motivated by goodness or cowardice. This is the constant motif, especially in the first dramatic scene proper, a Mephistophelean temptation which in effect offers him all the kingdoms of the world if he will… and he does. From here, Gorge becomes immensely wealthy and powerful and develops a casual relationship with truth, to the extent that he may not even know himself whether what he is saying is indeed so. But none of this can buy him love (a wife, yes, but not love, not as such), and his personal and business lives spiral downwards and unravel until… the title is symbolic rather than literal, but even so.
    
Featherstone runs matters fluidly after that first phase, with fine ensemble work from the cast, foremost among them Tom Brooke as Gorge and Pippa Haywood as his first-act temptress. In the end, though, after two and three-quarter hours, there is no end to speak of. And what has been communicated? That wealth is fleeting? That power corrupts? Kelly would surely not consider such truisms worth repeating. That the embrace of advancement as an amoral imperative is no more defensible now than its more primitive forebear, the “greed is good” ethos of the 1980s? Again, big deal. Gorge’s surname has Romance-linguistic echoes of phrases such as “much too much” or “more and still more”, but dramatically as well as materially, sometimes more is less.

Written for the Financial Times.