Wolves on Road, Bush Theatre, review: pedestrian attempt to get a grip on the wild west of crypto

Real life has overtaken Beru Tessema’s ebullient comedy about the online quicksands of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin –DOGE is also the acronym for the new government department to be headed up by Elon Musk in the forthcoming Trump administration, although it also, of course, refers to the cryptocurrency favoured by Musk himself.

It’s no fault of Tessema that whatever madness is being plotted by Musk feels like much the more urgent story of digital finance and its shadow-puppet masters than a drama about two East-End hustlers trying to get rich quick by buying up Dogecoin. Even so, Wolves on Road, which takes place primarily on an East-End estate, feels like a very rudimentary attempt to get to grips with the deregulated wild west of today’s currency revolutions.

Manny is living at home with his mother and, increasingly, her new, stuffy, out-of-touch boyfriend Markos, trying to establish an online business peddling fake designer goods, when his mate Abdul persuades him to plough his last £500 into Bitcoin. Surprise, surprise, it rapidly gains in value and soon Manny is renting a flat in Canary Wharf whose glittering shadow has long loomed over the Bow flats in which he and Abdul grew up.

What’s more, both boys start working for Denzel, a local boy made good on crypto and who purposefully targets his own money-transfer platform at east London’s Afro-Caribbean community who, he claims, are being exploited by traditional money-sending companies such as Western Union.

Surprise, surprise, again, following a sudden run on the market, everything quickly comes tumbling down, bringing with it not only Manny’s dreams but also those of the friends and family that he persuaded to invest. These include Markos, who had secretly been investing his cash to help Manny’s mother establish her own restaurant. Yet Tessema – whose previous play House of Ife was a richly textured drama of inter-generational conflict – can’t make this rags-to-riches-and-back-again story sing.

Kieran Taylor-Ford and Hassan Najib, as Manny and Abdul respectively, make it worth sticking with, bouncing about the stage high on banter and chutzpah, while Tessema’s whip-smart dialogue is a delight. Yet, Daniel Bailey’s production (he also directed the Bush’s recent West End hit Red Pitch) lacks confidence and, the odd technical hitch on the night I saw it aside, Amelia Jane Hankin’s set, with its perfunctory video graphics, squanders the chance to immerse the audience in the addictive Alice in Wonderland illusions of online life.

Tessema is a writer full of promise, but this play is unsure whether it wants to be an archetypal story about dreams and family ties, or, more tantalisingly, a drama about the ability of the digital economy to play into the very same anti-establishment sentiments and suspicion of elite systems that defines much of today’s cultural politics.

Until Dec 12; Tickets: 020 8743 5050; bushtheatre.co.uk