Economics Professor Marcus Miller turns the Banking Crisis into an Original Morality Play

Marcus Miller, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick, has created a short morality play set amid the turbulent banking crisis of recent years. Richard Fausto: His Rise and Fall treats recent economic developments as a game of greed. Set in the City of London, the play tells the story of a respectable High Street banker who learns to betray the trust ‘of those who trust you most’ so as to become fabulously rich. Prof. Miller based his play on Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus. The 15-minute play was originally created as a dramatic device to catch the attention of the audience at an academic conference in New York. Since then, it has been used as a way of encouraging students to think about issues that are discussed formally in academic papers presented in Topics in Global Finance course that is part of the MSc programme. Student volunteers gave the play its premiere before an audience of their peers as part of a ‘student experience’ event, held outside the lecture timetable, which also included student views on key topics in the course.