A frequent critique of financial markets – where billions are bet on ups and downs of commodities and currencies – is that greed is rewarded by ignoring consequences for employees or populations. The chilling ingenuity of The Invisible Hand by US dramatist Ayad Akhtar is to give a trader serious personal skin in the futures market.
Working for a US bank in Pakistan, Nick Bright is kidnapped by an Islamic State-like group. When his bosses refuse to pay the demanded ransom – on the grounds of it being immoral for bankers to deal with terrorists – the American becomes a worthless currency to his captors, who will fatally close their exposure to him.
Bright negotiates with the revolutionary leader Imam Saleem a reprieve – to buy his freedom by raising on the world markets the equivalent of the price on his head. As the hostage can not be allowed online access, he gives young laptop-touting jihadi Bashir - and, by thrilling extension, the audience – a seminar in the arts of going long and short for personal gain and public carnage. Watching the rupee and dollar earnings mount, we fight against complicity, understanding something of how money lust, regardless of collateral damage, takes hold of souls.
Akhtar – who won a Pulitzer prize for Disgraced, an equally sharp play about US homeland racism – achieves a morally twisty examination of values (financial, human, political) within a viscerally exciting drama set in a fetid cell in badlands (designed by Lizzie Clachan) fought over by rival terrorists and intermittently strafed by US drones (lighting by Oliver Fenwick).
Reviving her 2016 production, Indhu Rubasingham excels in her directorial signatures of pacy staging combined with clarity of narrative and characterisation. Akhtar has given Tony Jayawardena’s Imam, Scott Karim’s Bashir and Sid Sagar’s lowly gofer Dar a complex mix of venalities and mitigations, while Daniel Lapaine’s Bright shiftily suggests both those elements that make him an angel to capitalists and a devil to terrorists. Ticket recommendation – buy, buy, buy.
At the Kiln theatre, London, until 31 July
