Huge as it looms in business history,
costing some 20,000 people their jobs and many their life savings,
there is something absurd to the lay mind about the accounting systems
established by Jeffrey Skilling and Andy Fastow that allowed Enron to
keep hundreds of millions in debt off the books whilst booking assumed
future profits now. Lucy Prebble’s play, as directed by Rupert Goold
for Headlong Theatre, feels like a satire, even at times a romp, yet
each daftness is based in actuality. Enron’s conduct in the deregulated
electricity market of California is portrayed by a bunch of executives
wielding light-sabres: well, one of the terms they coined for their
predatory approach was “Death Star”. Fastow referred to his debt-eating
shell companies as “Raptors”, so there is a recurring visual
Jurassic Park motif (including even
the line “Clever girl!”). The Lehman Brothers appear as conjoined
twins, speaking in unison and wearing one huge joint overcoat. (OK,
maybe that last one’s not so factually grounded.)
Both script and production make it clear that this is not a historical
reconstruction but rather a speculative fiction. Nevertheless, the
ground gets covered, staged with Goold’s customary aplomb and powered
by a clutch of fine central performances. Samuel West is at first
unrecognisable, so far does he go in his sociopathic rendition of
Skilling; Tom Goodman-Hill’s Fastow is more neurotic, a Bloom to
Skilling’s Bialystock. Tim Pigott-Smith has a touch of the Ed Begley Sr
about him as CEO Kenneth Lay, following a “Don’t ask, don’t tell”
policy of his own. It is not a particularly woman-friendly play: Amanda
Drew is excellent as dissenting executive Claudia Roe but is simply
written out early in Act Two. Still, if things are occasionally
overdone, it is in keeping with a mood of what Alan Greenspan
described, in a market context, as “irrational exuberance”.
Written for the Financial
Times.