Revival of the play The Tale of a Trader at TNN, filmed by France 2 on this occasion, a biting play directed by Daniel Benoin, and superbly performed.
The Tale of a Trader is the story of a weekend panic at a major bank where the director learns that a trader has gambled 55 billion euros on the rise of the euro while it collapses. It’s a crisis. The bank has no more liquidity, and the director seeks government support in hopes of saving the bank and especially his own neck.
On top of this summary, there is a love story, or rather a love-dollar story, a golden calf, a cocker spaniel wedding, and a lot of lost money.
The play is superbly performed, with Lorànt Deutsch and Tchéky Karyo leading, they are absolutely divine, followed by Paulo Correia, Hubert Saint-Macary, and the excellent Christiane Cohendy. Tchéky Karyo as the bank director is incredible!
The staging is lively, ingenious, modern, playing with new technologies, featuring the use of mobile phones, computers, and video conferencing. The sets are occasionally animated, and Lorànt Deutsch’s video towards the end of the show is brilliant. His character is marvelously offbeat, bordering on madness, elevated by games, both gambling and video games.
One is amazed by the casualness of the trader who plays with money as if it were nothing, as if it had no consequences. The director’s anxiety of losing everything, especially his company car with a driver, is as revealing as it is outrageous. I often thought of Bernard Lavilliers’s song… “while bankers play with the ice floe.”
It’s the perfect illustration of a world where the notion of money reaches another dimension.
Sure, the play is fiction, but one can’t help thinking “hmm, this could almost have happened like this.”
It’s funny, ironic, fierce, the dialogues hit the mark, immersing us in this world where the stock market is just a game, where money is abstract. The show is brilliant, the actors commendable, and one leaves evidently delighted, albeit slightly reminded of the traces of reality, this one being very concrete.
