Indecent Proposal
Southwark Playhouse, London

Despite all we read about inflation, the cost of one of popular culture’s most debated moral dilemmas has remained remarkably stagnant.

In Jack Englehard’s 1988 best-selling novel, Indecent Proposal, a rich man offered a poor man $1 million to spend one night with the pauper’s wife. Five years later, in the movie adaptation, Robert Redford pledges Woody Harrelson the same amount to share a bed with Demi Moore. And, 33 years on from the book, the musical version of Indecent Proposal sees the big spender still bidding the lowest possible seven-figure sum for the brief sleazy time-share.

Yet, according to the US Treasury inflation calculator, a woman worth a million dollars four decades back should now go for $2,318,765.85. This fiscal fixity is explained by Dylan Schlosberg and Michael Conley’s sung version being set in a turn-of-the-nineties period that was originally contemporary but is now the far past. However, given that the clear aim of book and film was to get couples arguing over whether they would do the deal, this adaptation risks introducing the unanticipated moral complication of whether to haggle with the bidder.