Much like The Wolf of Wall Street, The Insider is a thriller about a real-life financial crime. However, Teater Katapult’s production gives itself a pair of extra challenges its cinematic counterpart lacked: (1) unlike the easily understood pump-and-dump con at the heart of the Scorsese film, the subject here is the far more abstruse Cum-Ex dividend fraud scheme uncovered in 2017 that caused Germany and some Nordic countries to lose tens of billions of euros; and (2) in place of Leonardo DiCaprio’s charismatic antihero, the sole on-stage character in The Insider is an extremely unlikeable lawyer who employs crude sociobiological justifications for his superior self-regard.
The production’s solution is ingenious: on entering the theatre, the audience dons headphones. These convey not only dialogue between the unnamed bank lawyer and various offscreen personalities, but also amplify every ambient sound: every shuffle of papers or stroke of the pen. Our attention is not our own. The bureaucratic and incidental become unavoidably salient, and the audience is helplessly drawn into the main character’s head. At the same time, all the action takes place within a glass box (often backdropped by extremely evocative video projections). The protagonist, a denizen of the Isle of Dogs financial centre, is no wolf of any street, but he clearly believes himself to be in a crystal palace above the riff-raff. The audience is able to see the same enclosure as a cell.
These brilliant technical innovations go a long way toward injecting tautness and adrenaline into what might otherwise be the dry story of an amoral and arrogant man’s participation in a dividend-reclamation conspiracy. However, some narrative issues remain. Our lawyer is neither redeemed nor reformed. His close relationships are sketched and found wanting, but to no apparent end. The international human costs of the scheme are more hinted at than detailed, depriving the tale of real bite. Though the script asks whether we know our own conscience, and challenges us to differentiate his actions from the kinds of petty fraud many might commit on their taxes, it lacks a focused moral critique.
Although the topic deserves a more incisive script, The Insider is still an ambitious and ground-breaking production, and, particularly, its exploration of multimedia to expand the power of storytelling is first-rate and well worth the price of admission.
