Last Friday night I went to the theatre. The play was about a group of people who played poker with each other for life-damaging stakes, and my feeling about such people is that they deserve every misfortune that they bring upon themselves. So I couldn’t get involved in the play or care about what happened to any of the characters in it. (It didn’t help at all that they were all men.) Poker for serious money has apparently been on the up-and-up in recent years, and especially since the time when this play, Dealer’s Choice by Patrick Marber, was first written and performed just over ten years ago. But for me all that this proves is that there are, now as always, lots of people around with more money than sense. People who merely gamble about which of them ends up taking home all the money leave me cold, and this play left me correspondingly refrigerated.
I mean, if you’re going to gamble, gamble about something. Do something where your knowledge of the world and ability to predict its happenings will benefit others. Why not, for instance, gamble on the stockmarket, or on commodity prices. Contrary to widespread opinion, these are immensely valuable activities (as Johnathan Pearce regularly explains here), which help to create a world of rationally negotiated prices for just about everything, and which enable other people (people like farmers particularly spring to mind) to avoid the very risks that you so like to take.
Or do something more creatively hazardous, which, if you can bring it off, will amount to more than mere money in your wallet, which in any case, if you are the kind of gambler I saw in the theatre last Friday night, you will probably squander within the month with more vacuous betting.
Why not, for instance, open a theatre – a theatre which doesn’t depend for its survival on state hand-outs but entirely on the number of bums on seats you can contrive and the quantity and quality of other goods and services you can ply the bodies attached to the bums with, like food and drink in appealing surroundings?
Which is exactly what my friend and host for last Friday evening, Don Riley, did do. His theatre, which is just up the road from London Bridge tube station, is called the Menier Chocolate Factory for the most obvious of reasons, which is that this is what it used to be.
When it came to the play we saw last Friday, deal me out. But as for the Menier Chocolate Factory generally, count me in. I’ll definitely be going again, and I enthusiastically recommend the place.
