SOURCE: Müller, Klaus Peter. “A Serious City Comedy: Fe-/Male History and Value Judgments in Caryl Churchill's Serious Money.” Modern Drama 33, no. 3 (September 1990): 347–62.

In the following essay, Müller asserts that Churchill's Serious Money fits the definition of a “City Comedy,” a genre established in the early seventeenth century referring to plays that satirize events and expose vices of London's financial district, its workers, and their practices.

Caryl Churchill's recent play, Serious Money, has been a great success both with the supporters of the City of London and those who are highly critical of the financial world. Financiers, brokers, jobbers and arbitrageurs came in droves to gleefully watch their life presented on the stages of, first, the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea and then the Wyndham Theatre in the West End of London in 1987–88. Various newspapers and magazines have puzzled over this interesting social and theatrical phenomenon...