Turns the sterile world of spreadsheets and accounting into stunning entertainment.
September 24, 2009 10:03ByJohn Nathan, John Nathan
Miracle of miracles, Lucy Prebble’s new play about the meteoric rise and — “fall” does not say it — plummet of America’s seventh largest corporation just after 9/11 turns the sterile world of spreadsheets and accounting into a stunning entertainment.
True, director Rupert Goold deploys just about every theatrical trick in the book. Enron, which was first seen in Chichester, is a straight play, a musical and a multi-media extravaganza. But at its core, it is a thriller, with the suspense derived from waiting to see Samuel West’s executive, Jeffrey Skilling, reap what he has sown.
We are taught how Skilling (the real version is serving the longest sentence ever handed down for corporate crime) and his accountants announced profits before they were made, and how his protégé Andy Fastow (also convicted) kept Enron’s share price artificially high with fake companies. All this is told with startling invention. The debt-consuming bogus companies, for instance, are depicted as money-eating dinosaurs. But Prebble never allows the corporate context to eclipse the human story. West gets terrific support from a fevered Tom Goodman-Hill as Skilling’s accounting wizard Fastow, and from Tim Pigott-Smith as Enron’s folksy but ruthless founder, Ken Lay. Lay died in 2006, five years after Enron. It is amazing that they have both been so triumphantly resurrected for the stage.
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