We often talk of how great wealth is corrupting, and point to the immorality of bankers whose greed brought about the financial crisis. But could poverty have an equally corrosive effect on the soul if your own survival is at stake? Who do you try and protect from the fallout: only family and friends?
Sofia (Lizzy Watts) is a young graduate in economically devastated Spain who, unlike so many of her contemporaries, has bagged herself a job. She’s a PA to a leading banker, Antonio. She’s earning good money. But her jobless best friend, Clara, is barely talking to her, and even her mother, Patricia (Rebecca Lacey), seems disconcerted by her daughter’s new job and wants to know what she had to do to get it, clearly finding it difficult to believe that Sofia did so on merit.
The question Alexandra Wood’s two-hander poses is not what people are worth, but what merits particular actions in extreme circumstances. Is Patricia’s interest in her daughter’s boss all it seems as the family finances take a turn for the worse, and is Sofia being truthful with herself and others about her relationship with Antonio?
The ambiguities keep coming right to the very last line, in a series of encounters between mother and daughter played out in a mini-Greek amphitheatre, topped by glass that could represent the skyscrapers of the bankers who are still doing just fine. It certainly points to the fact that this is not a Spanish story but a Europe-wide one.
It keeps you gripped, even though this is a play that works more for the head than the heart and is constructed through argument rather than character, giving the actors few opportunities. But if the relationship between mother and daughter is difficult to buy into, the moral questions raised deliver a punch in the age of austerity.
• Until 14 February. Box office: 01752 267222. Venue: Drum, Plymouth.
