The Price of Everything – review

Self-made businessman Eddie Carver is a man who appears to have everything: a gated Cheshire mansion, personalised number-plates, a couple of ponies in the paddock and a signed portrait of Kerry Katona on which he has lavished £9,000 at a charity auction. Yet there's something gnawing at him, and no number of security cameras can keep the worm of self-doubt from wriggling into paradise. To reveal the precise nature of Carver's anxieties would be to give away the plot of Fiona Evans's play, though it's reasonable to assume that anyone who spends nine grand on a picture of Kerry Katona must be capable of making some fairly rash business decisions. And the play is loaded with portents for anyone wishing to read the signs: a loaded shotgun, a Monopoly board, a wedding video in which the minister is heard preaching about the man who built his house on sand. We first meet Carver rehearsing a hubristic motivational speech in which he reveals that making deals "makes me hard". Yet the drama is undermined by a frustrating lack of detail about how the fortune was accumulated; and though Andrew Dunn works hard to present the character as the Agamemnon of Alderley Edge, it requires more than shouting abuse into his bank manager's answering machine to acquire tragic status. Noreen Kershaw's production is fleshed out by committed performances from Julie Riley as Carver's wife, a former beauty queen, and Jodie Comer as his daughter, an aspiring drama queen. In a programme note, Evan states that her intention was "to explore the lengths people go to for an apparently idyllic lifestyle and ask the question – is it worth it?" The short answer to that may be no.