ENRON.
London.
ENRON
by Lucy Prebble.
Royal Court Theatre (Jerwood Theatre Downstairs) Sloane Square SW1W 8AS To 7 November 2009.
Mon-Sat 7.30, Mats Thurs, Sats, 3pm.
Audio-described 24 Oct 3pm.
Captioned 29 Oct 7.30pm.
Post-show talk Oct 14
Runs 2hr 45mins One interval.
TICKETS 020 7565 -5000
www.royalcourttheatre.co.uk
Review: by Carole Woddis of performance seen Oct 2, 2009
Already sold-out at the Court, Enron transfers to the Noel Coward Theatre End later this year. Some tickets for there can be booked via the Royal Court, with a £1.75 booking fee by ‘phone or online.
Enron is Lucy Prebble’s second stage play and has been greeted with even more rapture than her stunning debut, aged 22, The Sugar Syndrome. It’s easy to see why. Like Howard Brenton and David Hare’s Pravda (1985) and Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money (1987), Enron captures the spirit of the age. And does so with tremendous panache.
To an extent, the play contains echoes of its predecessors; in the case of Pravda, the individual hubris of media magnates at the time of Murdoch (and Robert Maxwell)’s runaway takeovers. In Serious Money Churchill, with amazing prescience, caught the age’s financial love affair, with the City and its Big Bang `deregulation’ bonanza.
Enron, based on the infamous rise and fall of the US energy company, plays into both areas, being the story of an individual Jeffrey Skilling, its CEO, and charting the moral – or amoral – values on which his whole financial pack-of-cards was created and collapsed.
Like its predecessors, too, Enron is hugely if noisily entertaining – part epic, part satire, part musical pastiche. Director Rupert Goold, never one to miss a trick, carries the evening through on a wave of ascending visual excitements that owes something to Hollywood’s Gold Diggers of 1933, music hall and the Muppets.
The Lehman Brothers for example are a Tweedle-dum-Tweedle-dee double-act, housed in one coat. Enron’s mounting debt is portrayed as glint-eyed reptilian beasts called Raptors. Matthew Bourne associate, Scott Ambler, is responsible for the clever, breezy, sometimes insouciant movement. And over it all looms Anthony Ward’s iconic Times Square tower, criss-crossed by the market’s scurrying numbers and day-glo batons.
Prebble takes on a big subject and on the whole wins. Apart from the glitz of Goold’s production, at its centre is Samuel West’s subtle performance as the nerdy Skilling, unrepentant when finally indicted. “That’s our mirror… every dip, every crash, every bubble…all our creations are here. There’s Greed, there’s Fear, Joy, Faith…Hope…and the greatest of these…is Money.”
West is also terrifically supported by a hard-working ensemble and especially Tom Goodman-Hill as Andy Fastow, the archetypal acolyte prepared to push any boundary to please his boss.
News Reporter: Gillian Budd.
Lehman Brother/Trader: Peter Caulfield.
Security Officer/Trader: Howard Charles.
Trader: Andrew Corbett.
Claudia Roe: Amanda Drew.
Congresswoman/Business Analyst/Irene Gant: Susannah Fellows.
Arthur Andersen/Trader: Stephen Fewell.
Lehman Brother/Trader: Tom Godwin.
Andy Fastow: Tom Goodman-Hill.
Lou Pai,/Senator: Orion Lee.
Hewitt/News Reporter/Prostitute: Eleanor Matsuura.
Ken Lay: Tim Piggott-Smith.
Ramsay/Trader: Ashley Rolfe.
Jeffrey Skilling: Samuel West.
Daughter: Gabby Willcocks.
Lawyer/Trader: Trevor White.
Director: Rupert Goold.
Designer: Anthony Ward.
Lighting: Mark Henderson.
Sound/Composer: Adam Cork.
Video/Projections: Jon Driscoll.
Movement Director: Scott Ambler.
Vocal coach: Julia Wilson-Dickson.
Assistant director: Sophie Hunter.
2009-10-05 00:25:19