Il banchiere errante - Author's notes

Money is the cause of all evil. How often have we heard this phrase pronounced. The concept it contains has become one of the most common clichés of mass sub-culture. We have ended by believing it's true, even the best of us have fallen into this trap. This vile cliché has become synchronically attached to one of the most over-used and exploited prejudices of the western world, which tempted even a thinker of exceptional stature like Karl Marx: the Jew is the Master of money, the Jew lives for money, all Jews are automatically overflowing with wealth, all Jews are greedy for money. This list could go on for many pages and cases.

The purpose of this show is to effectuate a "Copernican" revolution towards our unjustly vilified currency, through an ethical reversal. The premise for this arduous task is the following axiom: man, not money, is the cause of all our evils!
It is, therefore, a sort of mental sclerosis, a confort for human mediocrity, which prevents us from understanding the luminous paradox according to which the relationship with money may become lofty and creative. Such a paradox has been the universal key used by the Jews in their two-thousand year history of endless exclusion. The Jew, whose only talent is for study, but who was forced with violence to traffic in money, through money has learned to invent a painful path to redemption and has ended by paying the price of those envied and therefore hated.

A rattle-trap band of musicians, a chanteuse, a narrator and two actors of dubious reputation, use our maligned currency to give birth to a project for a fatherland without borders, in order to establish a new relationship which refuses both the perversion of a false and iniquitous liberalism and the moralistic and bigotistic rigidity of protest for protest's sake.

Songs, music, diverse considerations, jokes, dances and literary epics and reflections will be, as in any low theatrical manifestation worthy of that description, the instruments used in this grotesque and tragicomic burlesque to pay the ransom which will redeem gold and deliver it to its new fate.

Finally, the audience will gain access to information and know-how which will allow everyone to become Jewish financiers. In this way, the fumes of hate will be dispersed and new routes will be opened for navigation in the stormy seas of the New Economy. Furthermore, we shall finally conquer the knowledge that a financial catastrophe is only the premise to a new, radiant business triumph.

Moni Ovadia