Roger Hall’s new play Easy Money is marketed as an adaptation of Ben Johnson’s much-loved comedy The Alchemist, although the Renaissance play is more of a prompt than a template.  

Australian grifters Stephen (Roy Snow) and Trudi (Luanne Gordon) aren’t trying to flog off the elixir of life, or promising to transmutate things into gold, as the con-artist servants do in the original. Instead, they are based in a swanky Auckland harbourside AirBnB, armed with a loose plan to shake down as many self-satisfied cashed-up wankers as possible in the hope of a quick payday and an early retirement.

After some low-level scams, and in the face of looming debts, Stephen has a bright idea: to sell shares in a new (and utterly fictitious) company that will rake it in over incoming toll charges on the Auckland Harbour Bridge. It’s so audacious that you can see the dollar signs flickering in the eyes of his marks.

In Ross Gumbley’s production of the play’s premiere, Stephen and Trudi’s new nosy neighbours stomp through their posh digs (designed beautifully by Harold Moot) with a profound and vulgar sense of entitlement. Everyone, from a lovelorn, horny internet hook up (Lynda Milligan) to the building’s rough-around-the-edges manager (Jared Corbin) is shamelessly on the make. Each is eventually undone by their own vice, avarice and hypocrisy, although this comeuppance isn’t always satisfying.

Easy Money’s strengths lie in its sense of place, and in the texture and detail of some of its characterisations. Snow is slick and genial as confidence man Stephen, and Gordon’s Trudi is charismatic, arch and very funny – brash and ridiculous without descending into caricature. She is also dressed beautifully by costume designer Deborah Moor, looking a new-moneyed dream in wide-legged culottes and cold shoulder blouses.

Bruce Phillips’ rendition of the lecherous alpha male mayoral candidate Sir Robert Greenwood is so utterly on point that my skin crawls every time he cackles, manspreads on the couch and greedily eyes up the women in the room.  Susannah Kenton is likewise pitch perfect as an elegant widow who takes pride in her performative philanthropy, while being more than happy to capitalise on dodgy art deals. Each of these characters is satirical, without feeling too broad-stroke.

Yet other characterisations lack clarity: why is our ‘Bishop’ Brian Tamaki stand-in (Albany Peseta, charming but miscast) so young? Is widower Peter (Geoffrey Heath) supposed to be Australian, or not? These issues contribute to the overall feeling that some of the play’s strands, and its admirable collection of intertwining cons, are fuzzy and indistinct, especially given that the complex plot relies on a precarious jenga-like arrangement of pieces to succeed.

Many of the running gags are very successful, such as people chucking things off the balcony, jokes about celebrated artist Colin McCahon’s maudlin colour palette, and a running tally of the grifters’ financial gains and losses that’s projected above the action. So, too, the visual humour as we shift from one apartment to another that’s being redecorated.

There is an undeniable timelessness to Johnson’s The Alchemist, yet I find some of the broader comedy to be very outdated, especially when it feels like action or set pieces have been imposed, rather than emerging organically from conflict.

My own tastes aside, the audience definitely runs hot and cold. It’s apparent that overall people have enjoyed it – the couple behind me are very complementary – but nonetheless the pacing is uneven.  By the end I can see the mechanics of the play, and the clever set ups of the various scams, but the sense of farcical cascade is still working out its rhythm. It doesn’t help that the scene transitions, which are initially nifty and thematically consistent in their conceit, end up slowing the action and defusing the tension, despite the use of music (from composer and sound designer Matt Short) that alludes to David Holmes’ dynamic scores for Stephen Soderberg’s Ocean’s films.

I have other questions, too: why is a financial scam in 2018 so 20^th century in its execution? What qualities does Peter’s young wife Lee (Melinda Joe, regrettably underutilised) have apart from being of Chinese descent (which is an ethnicity, not a character trait)? Why is Nigel the vapid real estate agent (Greg Cooper) doing karate kicks and drinking box wine? If the justifications for these are in the script, they are lost on me.

Hopefully some of these issues will be ironed out as the run continues, so that the play’s chaotic resolution, and the logic of its final twists and turns, can have a greater sense of satisfaction, novelty and coherency, even if much of Easy Money feels as familiar as some of the duo’s scams. 

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