Serious Satire

Are we as an audience supposed to sympathise with any of the characters or are they purely satirical?
The play is absolutely a satire and I think a good example of the dichotomy of responses that this play can provoke is that when it initially opened in 1987 in the West End some banks bought the whole of the theatre for the evening for their employees; they thought it was absolutely wonderful and saw it as a total celebration of their world. Of course people who weren’t associated with that world saw how it was criticising and commenting on their indulgent wealth. So of course it’s intended as a satire but the way you view the play is very dependant on your personal opinion of the world of finance.