‘ENRON’, Lucy Prebble’s much-praised dissection of capitalism running out of control, is coming to Theatre Royal Bath. Steve Wright loses his shirt.

In Britain we tend to be fond of our bounders. We indulge people like Alan Clark. But the architects of Enron are still unforgiven in New York.” The speaker is Rupert Goold – RSC associate director, high-flying director for Headlong Theatre and, most recently, of Lucy Prebble’s ‘ENRON’, a portrait of greed, number-massaging and corporate ruin in 90s and Noughties America. And he’s musing on why the latter play, after a triumphant UK debut and before a much-heralded tour this autumn, endured a torrid time on Broadway in the spring.

Prebble’s play uses theatre, music, dance and video to follow the decline and astonishing collapse of the US energy giant Enron, which filed for bankruptcy in 2001. In particular, it attempts to get under the skin of one Jeffrey Skilling, the company’s last CEO and a man whose visionary ideas – including a strategy of using projected profits to boost the share price while burying debt in a labyrinth of secret companies – would bring about the collapse of Enron. Lauded on its UK debut last year, the play lasted just a week in New York: maimed, it seems, by one critical mauling in the New York Times.

As Goold suggests above, the play’s failure Stateside may well have been down to the fact that the nerve it touched was still so raw. “I wanted the audience to feel in some way complicit with Skilling,” Prebble herself reflects. “But I could see that this was problematic for an American audience. In New York, they wanted to hate those guys. In ‘ENRON’, here is a man who says that he’s going to change the world – and Americans are comfortable with that idea. What they don’t like are people who change the world only to ruin it. I could feel the audience resisting, as if they were saying to me ‘How dare you? You say we’re all guilty: we’re not all guilty.’”

‘ENRON’ represents the culmination in a dramatic few years for its playwright. Now 29, Lucy Prebble made her mark with her 2004 debut ‘The Sugar Syndrome’, a well-wrought play for just four characters and tackling paedophilia, internet chat rooms, eating disorders and loneliness. She’s since created the TV series ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’. Nonetheless, come last summer Prebble was still a relatively unknown quantity. A year later, ‘ENRON’ is heading out on a national tour, having played to capacity West End audiences. Prebble has sold the film rights, reportedly to Columbia Pictures: that Broadway fiasco seems just a blip in the rise and rise of ‘ENRON’.

The play’s format is an interesting and, at first glance, a surprising one. Although it tells a true story, it is anything but naturalistic. Instead, faced with the task of trying to evoke complex financial skulduggery, Prebble and Goold went for a variety of different theatrical styles and techniques. Moments in the staging, indeed, hint at the musical which ‘ENRON’ was once intended to become. “We all went on a field trip to the London Metals Exchange,” Goold recalls. “Although we couldn’t hear what the dealers were saying on the floor, it was as if they were all taking part in the most incredible dance – preening, dynamic, sexy.”

Jeffrey Skilling is at the dark heart of ‘ENRON’. The play dissects his personality, exploring the reasons behind his actions and building a subtle connection between protagonist and audience. “There is something of the Shakespearean villain in Skilling,” Goold proffers. “Like Iago or Richard III, he tells us what he’s going to do and then goes ahead and does it. In doing so, he makes us complicit in his actions. Yet I see him much more as an over-reacher. He’s an Icarus whose wings melt when he flies too close to the sun. He’s a tragic hero, brought low by the sin of hubris.”

The Enron scandal did not just spell disaster for Skilling, who wound up behind bars: it also proved catastrophic for employees, stockholders and plenty of others with links, however tenuous, to a company that employed 22,000. Its aftershock also engulfed the respected accountancy firm Arthur Andersen. Did Goold feel an added responsibility in recounting a real tragedy with such a devastating impact?

“There’s an incredible excitement in making dramatic works from the lives of real people,” he replies. “At the same time, we were very aware that the real-life protagonists could well be in the audience. We decided that we’d not take any moral or political decision about the play. But I’d like audiences to think about how we make our authority figures accountable. I also hope that audiences will recognise how deep our need – our lust – to make money lies buried within our DNA.

“There’s a moment in the play which we call ‘The Why Scene’, in which Skilling’s daughter repeats the word ‘why?” after each of her father’s answers. Why do we – men, in particular – work so hard, whether it’s in the theatre or in business? I suspect that, at the kernel, men don’t quite know.”

ENRON WAS AT THEATRE ROYAL BATH FROM TUE 5-SAT 9 OCT. SEE REVIEWS FOR THE VENUE VERDICT.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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