Money isn’t just money: it is the thing that decides our relationships, our choices and our experiences. Dough is an unsettlingly hilarious and bittersweet tale about money and the lack thereof, by the internationally acclaimed, award-winning author, director and composer David Lescot (Portrait de Ludmilla en Nina Simone; A Woman Moves; The Force that Ravages All).
Lescot’s writing and stage work seeks to mix theatre and non-dramatic forms, particularly music, and has been recognised with multiple awards in France, including 3 National Union Critics Awards, 3 SACD prizes (SACD: Society of Authors and Composers of Theatre), The Critics’ Prize, and 2 Molière Awards.
From childhood to middle age, money gives life its tempo, with moments of profit or debts, joy and stress. The darkly comic Dough is a fast-paced and funny show charting a lifetime’s relationship to money – from the Tooth Fairy to negotiating with the funeral director.
Translated from French by Christopher Campbell, Dough takes a candid look at human life from an angle familiar to every member of a late-stage capitalist society. Zach Lusk (The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Phoenix Theatre, New York) takes to the stage as Lescot’s stage alter ego Me, accompanied by Matthew Brown (Oh Boy!, The Duke On 42nd Street, New York) and Hannah Mitchell (Warm-Line, Mabou Mines, New York), who portray more than forty characters met over the course of a single life.
As in reality, the play unfolds at a frantic pace that never stops, a continuous look at the passage of time that all audiences can relate to. Dough plays with the adage: from age 0 to 40 you learn about life, from 40 to 60 you dominate the world (or at least you try) and after 60 you learn how to die. For Lescot, it’s a ridiculous idea, but not an inaccurate image of life.
David Lescot will also bring the highly acclaimed Portrait of Ludmilla as Nina Simone to Edinburgh Fringe at the French Institute from 4 th – 14th August. An intense depiction of the legendary woman that was Nina Simone, actress Ludmilla Dabo sings her phenomenal story in a dazzling performance where the two artists come together.
