Enron as art: We're all too familiar with the characters in a hit London play

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Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle

Published 06:30 a.m., Monday, January 18, 2010

After all the trauma Houstonians went through with the collapse of Enron in 2001, including the loss of jobs and life savings, it's hard to imagine that the financial disaster has been transformed into a hit piece of entertainment, a hip London play that will soon be coming to Broadway with an all-American cast. (Soon to be a major motion picture?)

That's the case with Enron, the creation of 29-year-old playwright Lucy Prebble and veteran director Rupert Goold. Described as “an epic tragicomedy” by the Times of London, the play has earned rave reviews and sold out its 22,000-seat fall run.

Convicted Enron CEO Jeff Skilling may be cooling his real heels in a federal penitentiary while appealing his sentence, but his British avatar, actor Samuel West, is the dominant figure in Prebble's script as a magnetic combination of villain and anti-hero. Prebble's first version of Enron was a musical, but the songs were eventually dropped, leaving a drama leavened with a madcap trading-floor dance number and actors costumed as ogres to represent Enron's festering debt.

The late Ken Lay is portrayed by actor Tim Pigott-Smith as a Southern patriarch, and former chief financial officer Andy Fastow, also imprisoned, is played by Tom Goodman-Hill as a charmingly slippery character.

According to the Times review, “somehow you find yourself rooting for the man [Skilling] who you know is going to cause the biggest corporate calamity in American history. Hoping, entirely against hope, that the Enron party doesn't have to end.”

Perhaps that reaction is possible from British audiences who can view Enron's demise with the historical distance accorded a work of Shakespeare.

One suspects that Houstonians would not so easily look past the real-life characters to embrace their stage counterparts if Enron ever comes to town as a touring production. It might take an acting tour de force to get local audiences cheering for the principals of this sad story.

One suspects that Houstonians would not so easily look past the real-life characters to embrace their stage counterparts if Enron ever comes to town as a touring production. It might take an acting tour de force to get local audiences cheering for the principals of this sad story.

On the other hand, we do have a history of forgiving, and rehabilitating, our most colorful rascals …

Enron, Royal Court Theatre, October 2009

Enron, Royal Court Theatre, October 2009

18 October, 2009

With its sound effects, lighting, and occasional choreography this was the Sesame Street version of the Enron story, explained for those who missed the real thing. It was educational, showing the rise of the company under chairman Ken Lay, a glad-hander who had little idea of how the Enron bubble expanded nor why it was bound to implode. Lucy Prebble’s stage drama starts by focusing on the competition and sexual frisson between Jeffrey Skilling and Claudia Roe, showing Lay to be a decisive gambler who chooses Skilling to be the new chief executive, with his wild ideas of trading energy rather than producing it, as Roe wanted to do. Skilling then turns the aggressively ambitious Andy Fastow into chief financial officer so he can pursue his mad ideas of creating the Raptors — almost wholly owned subsidiaries of Enron — for swallowing debt. These extraordinary beasts, in which only a minority share of a minority share of a minority share was backed by real money, are well-staged as humans with alligator heads. For a public company the accountants, in this case Arthur Anderson, have to sign off on such creative accounting, and their doing so led to their own collapse.
As to the collapse of Enron itself we were shown how desperately they needed George Bush to win the 2000 presidential election to give them the deregulation of the Energy industry they’d been banking on to pay off the Raptors. In the process they failed, but screwed California, a folly that should never have happened if Ken Lay had half the political nous he imagined he had. Bush, who referred privately to Lay as ‘Kenny Boy’, had more important things to do than rescue him or his house of cards, and while Skilling got out before things went publicly pear-shaped, Lay continued to talk up the company to everyone. He and Skilling both screwed the employees, whose pension funds were tied up in Enron stock that became valueless as their jobs disappeared and the company went belly up.
This play showed a great deal about the rise of Enron, but omitted the story on how Lay, Skilling and Fastow were nailed. Living in America, I well remember in December 2002 being asked by English ingénues whether I really thought anyone would ever be convicted for the Enron fiasco. I replied that they already had, and the point is that Americans were apoplectic about this nonsense. It was criminal, and was prosecuted the same way a major crime family, or conspiracy, would be prosecuted. First you go for the smaller fry, giving them light sentences in return for cooperation so you can bring down larger game, until eventually you reach the top. This is what happened, but by the time they got to Ken Lay he conveniently died, leaving his wife with their ill-gotten gains. Skilling is now in prison, but his appeal is pending before the supreme court for sometime in 2010.
Samuel West did an excellent job of portraying Skilling as a man driven by a conviction he could outsmart everyone else, and really wasn’t guilty of anything worse than being a victim to forces beyond his control. Tim Pigott-Smith was Ken Lay, with his Texan accent and cheerful demeanour, sailing smooth seas and blithely unaware of the raptors beneath. Tom Goodman-Hill portrayed Andy Fastow, showing him to be a small man, rather like a graduate student whose PhD thesis wouldn’t even get him a receptionist’s job at the US Treasury, and Amanda Drew played Claudia Roe as a very smart, very sexy and attractive lady, who was lucky to be sacked when she was.
The whole thing was well directed by Rupert Goold, with clever designs by Anthony Ward. I particularly liked the ‘alligator’ raptors, and the Lehmann Brothers appearance with two men in one coat. Despite slight misgivings, it was an evening that didn’t drag for a minute, and like Sesame Street kept the audience entertained while informing them of the basics they ought to know.
In 2010 this is playing at the Noel Coward Theatre in London’s West End.

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Review: Enron

Monday, 21 September 2009

Review: Enron

Premiered this summer in Chichester and now making the move to Sloane Square's Royal Court, Lucy Prebble's second play Enron has achieved a quite astonishing level of success. Bolstered by four- and five-star reviews earlier this year, the entire run at the Royal Court sold out before opening and a West-End transfer has already been announced. Fortunately, the play lived up to its billing and provided a highly entertaining and educational evening.

Telling the story of Enron, a much-feted energy corporation whose surprise collapse in 2001 leaving billions of dollars of debt, Prebble has done a fantastic job in making the subject of financial manoeuvring very accessible and engaging, whilst never patronising her audience, and her work is given extra strength due to the current state of the economy and our subsequent realisation that this was not an isolated incident as first believed.

One of the main strengths of this play is its unerring plausibility, and this is perfectly exemplified by the well-drawn characters and the performances of each of the leads. There are no pantomime villains here, no evil chuckling over bags of swag, but rather 3 businessmen making increasingly bad decisions. Tim Pigott-Smith as Enron's wily founder Ken Lay is full of backslapping southern bonhomie which belies his ruthlessness and complicity as the share price soars; Tom Goodman-Hill was highly impressive as the financial officer Andy Fastow whose inventive schemes to hide the debts are brilliantly explained in a key scene with a Russian doll-like collection of boxes; and finally Samuel West is just superb as Jeffrey Skilling, the chairman who led Enron on its merry dance. We follow him on his tumultuous journey from the overweight, gauche Harvard ingenue on his arrival, through his ruthless climb to the presidency (shafting his rival, the ever-excellent Amanda Drew), losing weight and morals as he rises to the top and then desperately trying to maintain the untenable position through ever-increasingly outlandish schemes. West imbues his performance with enough humanity so that one does end up sympathising somewhat with him, yet all-the-while remaining a thoroughly unlikeable chap.

The rest of the company also deserve a mention though, as they work extremely hard and do an excellent job: singing, dancing, playing at dinosaurs, fighting with lightsabres, all and more are carried out with aplomb and fantastic energy, the scene changes in particular were admirably swift.

Rupert Goold's direction here, particularly in the first half, is simply dazzling. Bringing together elements of song, movement and video, and weaving in highly effective lighting, sound design and a visually arresting set, the combined effect is often breathtaking. There's a strong vein of dark comedy which highlights the absurdity of what Enron was able to get away with, and whilst the energy of the play subsides slightly in the second half with the shift to a more traditional story-telling and less of the Gooldisms, the sheer quality of the acting carries it through.

This is a great play, which at any other time would have been well-received anyway due to the inventiveness of the direction and clarity in demystifying the murky pool of financial nefariousness, but its timing now and the light it sheds on the reasons for the state of the world today elevates it to outstanding. Thought-provoking and educational, but above all, highly educational: do not miss!