The more things change, the more they stay the same. Whenever and wherever throughout human history one individual holds in trust the property of another, there is the temptation for fraud. Well before 1920, when Charles Ponzi's name became attached to the fraudulent investment scheme called a "Ponzi," there was plenty of opportunity for this capitalist shell game whereby the money of new investors paid the dividends of older participants (read Dickens' Little Dorrit for a great example). It's called "robbing Peter to pay Paul."

What really distinguishes a proper Ponzi scheme is the Ponzi himself-that is, the personality of the perpetrator that inspires the trust and confidence of his investors. He is charming, wealthy, reeking of social stability and generosity, philanthropic, morally solid, and warm and steadfast to his friends (who are likely to be his victims). Under the surface of this persona, he betrays his friends and his family by using their best and worst instincts against their interest. He skims the sham profits to finance his own lavish lifestyle. Even more important, he is compelled to his actions, not so much by profit per se, but by admiration of his own artistry and the thrill of his predatory flim-flam. How long can he sustain the delicately balanced artifice? How easy or how challenging will it be to dupe the next sucker? How can he play off one upstanding citizen against another trusting friend? It is fascinating that Harley Granville Barker so completely nailed this personality in 1905, a good century before Bernie Madoff proved himself the gold standard of Ponzis.

But what makes it possible for a Ponzi to operate? Year in, year out? Surely this confidence game requires willing sheep to be led to the slaughter, "victims" willing to set aside their skepticism in favor of their own greed and sense of exceptionalism.

This is why this dark capitalist fairy tale is called The Voysey Inheritance, not "The Voysey Curse" or "The Voysey Secret" or anything like that. While the first act of the play introduces the charismatic, smooth-talking, self-justifying patriarch responsible for the corrupt state of the family business, the rest of the play shows the response of his beneficiaries and victims when the rot at the heart of Mr. Voysey's career is revealed. It ain't pretty. Although it's pretty funny.

Voysey had discovered that everyone has his price. A comfortable hush-money arrangement with Peacey, the clerk of the firm, has guaranteed the employee's absolute loyalty for decades. As for Voysey's oldest clients-his lifelong friend George Booth and the local vicar-they are outraged until they devise their own extortion schemes to increase their personal gain at the expense of other clients. The most upright of the victims are eager to become partners in the crime.

The grown children of the Voysey family-rich, spoiled and indolent in their ill-gotten upper-middle class status-are essentially indifferent to the impact of their father's crimes on the lives of his other clients. What matters to them is that their own lifestyles are not compromised and they mask this concern under the pretense of "family honor." Never mind that, due to the lifelong machinations of the elder Mr. Voysey, there is no honor to be had. The terror is that their society will find out, that public perception (which Mr. Voysey has so skillfully manipulated) will change. It's also interesting to observe that the money provided by Voysey's scheme to support his family has undermined the children's ability to achieve anything of their own. Major Booth is a regressive blow-hard, pompous and jingoistic. Hugh, who wanted to be an artist, has made only soft choices in his art and has never fulfilled his abilities. The girls, Honor and Ethel, are dependent on family status quo or on the chance of a good marriage, with housekeeping financed by Voysey wealth. Only Trenchard, the son kicked out of the family, has made an independent career at the bench.

The son most mired in the morass created by the patriarch is Edward Voysey, the one who truly inherits the mess his father has made. His instinct is to deal with the consequences in an honest, forthright manner. But, in the case of people defrauded through their trust, what really is the good? Is it to come clean publicly, thereby throwing all the clients and his own family into ruin and going to jail himself? Or is it to struggle as long as possible to right the accounts of the most vulnerable clients, thereby working illegally as did his father, but for "noble" ends? Poor Edward swims in morally murky waters either way. With this smoothly dramatic dilemma, Harley Granville Barker indicts the entire capitalistic society of the early Edwardian era, where everyone is implicated and inter-tangled. No one is truly innocent.

Harley Granville Barker (1877 - 1946) is unquestionably one of the giants of modern theatre, though not primarily for being a successful playwright. The child of a London stage entertainer (she was known for her bird whistle performances!) and a lack-luster real estate developer, Barker had little education but was an actor by age 14. By age 23 he was well-known on the British stage. In early photos he is a dishy cross between a handsome matinee idol and a young, world-weary Jeremy Irons. By age 27 he was the producer and director of the tiny Royal Court Theatre where, in three legendary seasons, he championed Bernard Shaw (producing his plays for the first time), Ibsen, Materlinck, Hauptmann, and introduced classics by Euripides. The Voysey Inheritance premiered here along with new plays by women playwrights like Elizabeth Robins, and some new offerings by John Masefield, John Galsworthy, and others. In addition to being the white knight of the new realistic theatre, Barker as an actor created such roles in Shaw's plays as John Tanner (Man and Superman), Adolphus Cusins (Major Barbara), and Eugene Marchbanks (Candida). At the same time, thoroughly disillusioned with the English commercial theatre, he began a campaign advocating a national, state-subsidized theatre. He is acknowledged as the father of the National Theatre, although two world wars prevented its establishment until after Barker's death.

For ten years he played and managed the various London theatre houses, struggling to move radical directing and innovative repertory into the commercial mainstream. Between 1912 and 1914, he produced, directed, and acted in three Shakespearean productions at the Savoy that fundamentally reordered the way Shakespeare has been produced ever since. In The Winter's Tale, Twelfth Night, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, Barker insisted that the text came first, adhering to the original and demanding dialogue delivery that was conversational, not declaimed. He emphasized the work of the company, abolishing the star system. He remodeled the theatre, adding a thrust apron stage that brought the play into the audience. He stripped the set, recreating it as expressive and symbolic, not literal. A successful American tour in 1915 was the gateway to a new life. He fell desperately in love with a fabulously rich American novelist (Helen Huntingdon), left his first wife and leading lady (Lillah McCarthy), retired from the theatre, served in the Red Cross during the Great War, married Helen (which broke his friendship with Shaw), moved to France, acquired a hyphen for his name (becoming Harley Granville-Barker), and spent the rest of his life writing his brilliant, practical and production-centered, 12-volume Prefaces to Shakespeare, the cornerstone of most Shakespearean analysis and production ever since.

Hero of the stage though he truly was, Harley Granville Barker's own plays are tough to act as written. Having chewed through the long Edwardian dialogues and numerous scene changes of the original script of The Voysey Inheritance, I applaud the rescue operation of adaptor David Mamet (b.1947).Mamet, himself a great playwright of men behaving badly and the arcane workings of American business, has pared down Barker's drawing room debacle of family finance to its dramatic essentials. He has edited it, not recreated it, leaving the dilemma of a century-old Ponzi scheme as fresh and relevant as if it had happened-oh, just a few months ago.