Enron by Lucy Prebble
Noël Coward Theatre, London
21-07-2010
‘Only people that are prepared to lose are ever going to win.’
The collapse of Enron in 2001 was a spectacular financial disaster, a result of mismanagement and corporate greed. Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay and Andy Fastow were the senior company figures who oversaw the events which unfold in the play. Prebble deals with the circumstances surrounding Enron’s demise against the backdrop of the current recession, at the time of writing. The play fuses characters and events from reality, comedy, music, dance and multimedia effects to create a surrealist take on this story of financial (and moral) ruin. Enron is a new kind of morality play.
A bare stage greets the audience with blue fluorescent lighting from the floor and various office equipment placed in view in the wings. The opening montage of three blind mice – actors wearing oversized mouse heads crossing the stage tentatively – sets up a damning critique of the organisation of the corporation; the blind leading the blind with no sight of future failings. As the mice leave the stage, they are replaced by office workers, an ensemble of suited office drones engaged in song and dance to disguise their often immoral behaviour. Early in the first half, the audience is assured of the success of Enron's rise - it is claimed to be as 'certain' as 'that planes won't crash'. This image will reverberate through the play in its closing stages.
Later, ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ by Guns N’ Roses plays over a montage of debauchery and extravagance - a traders’ Millennium party - with the cast dressed as cowboys. This scene foreshadows Enron’s downfall and highlights the recklessness of the individuals involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. A cameo appearance of the Lehman brothers in the second half - two actors underneath one oversized overcoat - as bumbling, indecisive caricatures is highly comedic in retrospect of recent world economic crises. The involvement of investment banks in funding Enron’s expansion should have provided clear and final warnings to the US government regarding unchecked bank activity. Prebble draws clear links between mistakes in the handling of Enron and the fall of the banking sector.
Enron’s biggest problems arguably lay with Fastow, played by Paul Chahidi, who orchestrated a “ghost” company to support the Enron share price as a means of removing debt. Chahidi does an admirable job in the role, demonstrating with distinction the transition of Fastow from timid accountant through to power hungry financial controller and ultimately to broken and shamed federal criminal. Early in the play, Fastow is dropped into a bear pit of traders - their macho, overly aggressive demeanour attributed to their Darwinian instincts - a survival of the fittest where the brash and often obnoxious rise through the ranks as the face of the organisation whilst the meek remain in the background or, like Fastow, holed up alone in a secluded basement.
The characters have a colourful rhetoric, necessary to implement their plans. To quote Fastow, ‘[all] money is debt, it’s just how you present it.’ Prebble offers a glossary of financial jargon in the programme notes but one is missing – raptor. The raptors are designed to take care of Enron’s debts and eliminate them. These raptors are physically represented by actors adorned with a dinosaur head. Fastow nurses them in his basement lair, becoming increasingly psychotic and desperate as he has little contact with any other characters in the play, besides Skilling on occasion. Chahidi's performance as a deluded man compliments Skilling's own decline.
Ed Hughes portrayed Jeff Skilling, the CEO of Enron. Hughes is the company understudy for the role but does an admirable job as lead. He balances the ever increasing anxiety of a family man who is at the helm of an continually expanding corporation. In interaction with other characters, Hughes portrays Skilling as a loud and brash individual, egalitarian and demanding. Despite displeasing personal attributes, Skilling is successful and impresses his workers - a security officer insists, 'we trust y'all up here.' He offers his charges the mantra, ‘[make] Wall Street look like Sesame Street’, to highlight the furious competition within the industry. In a sequence to summarise Enron’s role in rolling blackouts of power in California, Skilling appears with a red lightsabre, a symbol from the Star Wars franchise of evil whilst other characters hold green lightsabres, symbols of good.
The tenderness displayed by Hughes during Skilling’s scenes with his young daughter serve to contradict this simple labelling of him as evil. He confesses his obsession with the Enron share price is because, ‘[that’s] how Daddy knows how much he’s worth.’ At this point, and later when Skilling is dressed in orange prison overalls, he looks like a desperate, empty man drawing the audience’s sympathy. On the video screen, the falling share price relates directly to the slow, painful demise of the character - the lower the price, the further Hughes pushes his performance into abject anguish, trapped in a manic downward spiral.
The video projections onto the back wall of the stage are a central focus of the design. At several scene changes, political and commercial successes of the USA in the 1990s are displayed. Stocks and shares prices wash over the stage – a notable effect is the faces of the actors being turned yellow by the vast series of numbers. After the interval, an Enron commercial – ‘Ask Why’ – is shown. Later, former Enron employees will demand answers from those responsible for the crisis only to be met with diversionary tactics and avoidance. In the latter stages of the play, a visual of the Enron logo being shredded - in quite chilling fashion the image is transposed on video of the towers of the World Trade Centre collapsing under terrorist attack. A narrator describes the crash of financial markets following the event which exposed Enron's ineptitude and instability and hurried along its collapse.
It may be a crude analysis, but the Brechtian stylistic elements of music, song and visual aids are what make the play successful in conveying the moral of the tale. Whilst the characters have lost their moral compass, in the current economic situation, the regular taxpayer has domain over "bail-outs" and paying tax to relieve budget deficits and can see the bigger picture, feeling aggrieved and most hard hit when things go wrong. During the interval I overheard a fellow audience member critiquing the "burlesque and slapstick action" when tackling serious subject matter. Such light relief is essential - as audience members, we can see that with proper observation and management, financial crises can be avoided. Greater control and regulation is required in corporate society to avoid ruin and corruption in future.
‘We don’t just play the game, we are the game.’
