Though it wasn't the first hit play about chicanery in the world of high finance – Caryl Churchill's Serious Money caused a stir in 1987 – Enron (2009) could claim to be the only play to date to turn the real-life collapse of a US energy giant into an all-singing, all-dancing night out at the theatre.
Even more astonishing is it to find that its 28-year-old author, Lucy Prebble, had only written one other stage play, The Sugar Syndrome, prior to writing what many regard as one of the defining plays of the new millennium.
Rupert Goold's razzle-dazzling production of Enron opened at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester, in 2009, transferring to the Royal Court and afterwards to the Noel Coward Theatre early in 2000, followed by a UK tour. It fared less well on Broadway, despite some rave reviews. However, the all-important New York Times poured cold water on its box office prospects by declaring that it was ‘all show and little substance.’
Plot
We follow the rise and fall of Jeffrey Skilling, a modern-day Macbeth, who received the longest sentence for corporate crime in history after Enron went bankrupt to the tune of $38 billion. The once-geeky Skilling is appointed president of Enron over the head of his attractive female rival, Claudia Roe, a fictional character who becomes the conscience of the play.
Skilling has a vision for the company as a powerhouse for ideas rather than a supplier of practical resources. While Roe advocates making money by selling energy, Skilling wants to build an empire based on smoke and mirrors. His nerdy sidekick creates phantom companies that send Enron's share prices into the stratosphere, all the while concealing mounting debts. Once the market loses confidence, Skilling's pipedreams are revealed for what they are – fraudulent fantasies.
It concludes with the disgraced Skilling in his prison clothes while a chorus of Enron employees reveals the cost of his deception: bonuses of $55 million for the executives, and 20,000 people out of a job.
Style
Lucy Prebble's debut play, The Sugar Syndrome, which won the George Devine Award in 2004, was a dark, intimate, psychological drama dealing with paedophilia and internet dating. Her follow up play, Enron, could hardly have been more different. Using highly imaginative production values and what one critic described as ‘an almost Shakesperean sweep, director Rupert Goold turned Prebble's version of Enron's decline and fall into an eye-popping feast of theatrical excess’.
Prebble uses the anarchy of the trading floor as a kind of chorus, making sure the audience doesn't get bogged down in the minutiae of financial gobbledegook. She and the cast visited the stock market bearpit during rehearsals to get a sense of its singular madness. She said in an interview, ‘It's the purest form of theatre, and belief in it is the kind of religion behind our society.’
In his Guardian review, Michael Billington wrote: ‘It could all be as dry as dust. But the pulse and vigour of play and production stem from their ability to make complex financial ideas manifest. What they vividly offer is not a lecture on corporate madness but an ultra-theatrical demonstration of it at work.’
Time Out New York wrote, ‘Prebble and Goold supply Broadway theatregoers with the sort of play they demand – a sharp-witted and rollicking business thriller to dazzle the eye and tickle the brain,’ while the trade paper Variety found that its ‘sensational stage effects deliver the same blood-pumping thrills as a musical.’
Prebble, whose father ran a multinational software company, originally wanted to make it into a musical, but Goold thought it would be better to use music in a more organic way. In an article for the journal Prospect, the critic Michael Coveney evoked its staging, ‘The traders sit at illuminated desks like regimented figures in a dance piece; the stage is hung with celestial neon-lit pipes; the banking Lehman Brothers are portrayed as a comic double act crammed into one large pinstriped suit; Arthur Andersen, the doomed accountancy firm, is a mute ventriloquist's dummy. Later on, three blind mice stalk a stage populated by large-masked vultures.’
Staging and Props
In the present financial climate, few companies would be able to achieve the elaborate original staging, with its hi-tech effects, large cast, and Jon Driscoll's brilliant projection designs. And yet the play continues to be popular with universities and drama schools because of its fizzing theatricality combined with important reflections on unbridled greed, self-delusion and toxic masculinity.
Like all great plays, Enron works with a more stripped-down presentation because of the power of its writing and construction. A resourceful director would find ingenious ways of demystifying the complexity of the story that don't necessarily cost a fortune.
Resources
- Enron is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, with an introduction by Natasha Tripney.
- Enron: Much Ado About Money by Michael Coveney was published in Prospect magazine, 27 August, 2009.