Gasping is perhaps too apt a title. It symbolizes the plot. It evokes the audience's inundation with sexuality and their mildly shocked response to it. It describes the characters' final moments before they suffocate, and the audience’s reaction when it’s finally over. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not bad—just too long, too overtly politicized to go deep, and too apt a parody of modern economics to sit comfortably. And when you leave the theatre, gasping will describe your appreciation of the air you breathe—for free!

For, in Ben Elton’s world the air we breathe has become another commodity. (Written in 1990, nice touches were added to update it to make it plausible this year). A corporate executive, Sir Chiefly Lockhart (oh, the subtlety), is looking for the next “Pot Noodle”—you know, the next new product, entirely innovative, never been done before. His aspiring business-savvy, business-obsessed, business-protégé, Philip, discovers “Suck and Blow”. (This is not anywhere near the most blatant entendre.) The machine sucks oxygen from the air, and blows it back so people can breathe only purified air.

The resonances with modern politics are plentiful and overt. Originally envisaged only for the wealthy, soon the air quality has become so degraded that everyone needs purified air (think bottled water). Lockhart destroys air, while poor people suffocate, in order to drive up the prices (think food). Cheap imports of air are driving down the prices and preventing the market from supplying enough air (think generic AIDS drugs in Africa). Some of these analogies will make even a neoclassical economist shudder a bit, before dismissing them as simplistic. But the play undermines this impact by making it all so explicit, including a nice little moral at the end: “If you can’t make a profit without selling your soul, then you shouldn’t be in business.” Or if you’re not a businessman-type: “we all profit from suffering.”

The play only gets submerged in politics in its second-act. In the first act, Philip, played likeably and with sustained energy by Christopher Quinn, develops a crush on his co-worker, the hard-nosed Kirsten. Thus, stumbling over his words, he briefly has to face up to his inability to see the world in any other terms than business ones as he tries to woo her. But she turns out to be a lesbian, and his moment of benevolent epiphany, though it happens at some indefinite point later-on, is never well-understood. This is an ideas-driven play, not a character-driven one.

But it’s powered through from start to finish by a rapid progression of stand-up style jokes (mostly bad sex-puns), which lose their spontaneity and can’t hide their superficiality. The best penned lines are ones describing such things as the Native American chief Seattle as a “senior executive” and carrying the business perspective down to its most absurd conclusions. But it was the physical humour which generated the heartiest laughs - both because it was good and because we became increasingly numb to any verbal wit as the play progressed.

As an idea, Gasping works wonderfully by taking the genre of capitalist-critique plays to an insightful extreme. But in this production Elton himself comes across as mediocre: it’s too long, too explicit, too long-winded. There’s no air left to breathe.

Oliver Morrison