It’s the Economy, Stupid! review – engaging account of maths, money and personal cost

Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh
Joe Sellman-Leava's dramatised lecture, with droll asides from Dylan Howells, could hit harder at a greater length

The title is a phrase coined by a strategist for Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign amid the recession and its deployment in this show is emphatically ironic. To cite recession as the cause of a broken economy is, according to writer-performer Joe Sellman-Leava, like blaming the weather for causing climate disaster.

This becomes self-evident over the course of this dramatised lecture he performs with Dylan Howells as they blend macroeconomics with the micro effects on Sellman-Leava's early family life. He was born around the time of the presidential campaign statement and tells us how his shop-owning parents lost their business, and faced the shame of bankruptcy, bailiffs and eviction. Alongside this he describes his fascination with money and maths as a young boy: Maths was logical, money was magic," he says.

At Pleasance Dome, Edinburgh, until 26 August

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