Showing @ The King’s Theatre, Wed 10 – Sat 13 Nov
‘There was a warning…and its name was ENRON’, runs the amusing tag-line for Lucy Prebble’s much-hyped 2009 portrayal of the odious energy company that collapsed spectacularly in 2001. Indeed, it’s impossible to miss the fundamental relevance of the story, long since conveyed on page and screen, after 2008, but what Prebble brings to it is a vivacious sense of the satirical which capitalises on the notion that the grand illusions ENRON ran on made the company inherently theatrical.
It begins in Texas when ENRON founder and chairman Kenneth Lay (Clive Francis) hears an impassioned speech from the hubristic Jeff Skilling (Corey Johnson) on how the future of energy lays in delivering power not by pipes but by stock exchange. Soon this too-abstract, ‘mark-to-market’ approach sends the company’s worth sky high, but it’s not long before these dubiously projected earnings prove to be so. With the help of eccentric employee Andy Fastow (Paul Chahidi), Skilling succeeds in covering up the bad credit, but soon the press pick up the scent.
Prebble succeeds in turning economics into dynamic theatre by two methods; first, by charting the companies downfall in its wider societal context, with footage of such touchstones as the business-minded Clinton and the Twin Towers revealing the kind of society a company like ENRON emerges from; and second, by injecting the action with bold theatrics, like the taking of the company names Fastow invented to cover up the debt, such as Raptor and Jedi, for the show’s imagery, with raptor-headed suits literally eating away the debt sheets as they prowl the stage. This touring production has put together a solid ensemble who manage the more or less even balance of surreal satire and erudite social commentary, with Chahidi’s manic energy proving a highlight. Prebble had apparently been working on the script prior to 2008, and her analysis indeed helps expose the individualistic attitude behind the latest economic disaster the coalition is currently capitalising on. “Have you read The Selfish Gene“, Skilling asks Fastow from his symbolically solitary treadmill, and it is of course Dawkins’ vision of the hubristic individualist that this show sees at the root of our current crisis, and it’s a thoroughly encouraging thing to see it discussed in mainstream theatre.