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| Samuel West as Jeffrey Skilling |
Date: 3 February 2010
Following sold-out, critically acclaimed and award-winning runs at the Chichester Minerva Theatre and Royal Court, Lucy Pebble’s Enron finally transferred to the West End last week, opening to a star-filled audience at the Noel Coward Theatre (See 1st Night Photos, 27 January 2010).
Described as an "epic tragedy", Enron is inspired by the real events surrounding the Texas-headquartered energy company that filed for bankruptcy in 2001. The cast is led by Samuel West (who has also enjoyed a fruitful association with Chichester) as the corporation's president Jeffrey Skilling, alongside Tim Pigott-Smith as chairman Ken Lay, Amanda Drew as a fictional executive and Tom Goodman-Hill as Fastow, a financial whizz-kid.
Although perhaps not as glowing as the reviews that greeted its premiere in Chichester (See Review Round-up, 23 Jul 2009), Enron can still be considered one of the hottest tickets in town after another raft of positive notices. Samuel West was again praised for his "masterful" depiction of Skilling, though the Independent's Paul Taylor, reviewing the play for the first time, sounded a rare note of negativity by highlighting the "undernourishment of the relationships" within Prebble's prize-winning text.
Jo Caird on Whatsonstage.com (five stars) – “The great Samuel West leads the same cast as that which first appeared at the Chichester Minerva Theatre in July last year, then at the Royal Court in the autumn, and the company crackle with energy and wit now just as they did in each of the previous incarnations of the show. Anthony Ward’s set looks fantastic on the larger stage of the Noel Coward Theatre after the more confined environment of the Court … Rupert Goold’s thrilling staging, complete with light sabre choreography, stalking raptors and line-dancing traders is a theatrical feast. This transfer is just what Lucy Prebble’s astoundingly mature play deserves. ” Lyn Gardner in the Guardian (four stars) – “In recent years, the stock of director Rupert Goold, the closest thing British theatre has to its own PT Barnum, has risen so high that he is regularly mentioned as a future artistic director of the National Theatre. The bubble shows no sign of bursting with his West End transfer of Lucy Prebble's all-singing, all-dancing morality play … a piece so confident it's astonishing that it is only her second play. Audiences that put their money into this ticket are guaranteed a return … exuberantly staged as a cross between a vaudevillian nightmare and roistering Jacobean City comedy … Sam West is remarkable in what is a remarkable cast … you might argue that the overlay of visual tricks and video amount to show-off distractions, in this show they are put to terrific use to create the dizzying and seductive spectacle of capitalism itself … in Anthony Ward's design the figures flash before our eyes in mesmerising digital displays that capture the giddy euphoria of the markets … Prebble has brought clarity to a complex story, cleverly blurring the line between fact and fiction to considerable dramatic effect.” Paul Taylor in the Independent (three stars) – “I can absolutely see why Lucy Prebble's play and Rupert Goold's production received ecstatic reviews when it opened last summer in Chichester … both the script and the staging make vividly intelligible such fiendishly twisted concepts as mark-to-market. It is also the kind of production that is easy to write about … I admired Prebble's piercing and principled clarity … it struck me as just a tad sophomoric, or at least what a bright, ambitious undergraduate might concoct if s/he had a healthy budget … the men in business suits with raptor heads are supposed to symbolise the ravenous shadow companies. These figures should look morally repulsive; instead, they look shallowly risible … This brings me to the undernourishment of the relationships in the piece. Samuel West brings some masterly moral shading to Faustian über-geek, Jeffrey Skilling. But the scenes with his little daughter, designed to show him as guilty and emotionally inadequate, are themselves guilty of emotional inadequacy in both the writing and the staging … the show seems vestigial of an earlier plan to make it a musical. While I would not go as far as to say that this is a soulless take on a soulless world, I will say that alternative values are not feelingly enough implied and that if anyone fancies writing the masterpiece of financial meltdown, the field is still wide open.” Fiona Mountford in The Evening Standard (four stars) – “If there’s one thing that those working on Lucy Prebble’s dazzling account of the collapse of the Texan energy giant know, it’s that the boom times can’t last forever. To this observer, who gave a five-star rave for the Chichester premiere, a small but crucial helping of sparkle has disappeared. Maybe it’s been drowned under the six-month deluge of superlatives that Prebble rightly received for the thrillingly clear yet delightfully playful way she conveys the overarching financial hubris of Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling … Rupert Goold gives all this his customary whizz-bang treatment, flooding the stage with ticker-tape electronic screens, neon lights and, when the US energy market is deregulated, light-sabres for a spectacularly well-drilled ensemble of financial Every-people. Samuel West skillfully suggests Skilling’s metamorphosis from an overweight, bespectacled nerd to super-fit financial Superman, although his astonishing thriller-like momentum, which had the clinical purity of Greek tragedy, has dissipated. This time around, I was more struck by Tim Piggott-Smith as Enron’s disingenuous founder. Slight quibbles notwithstanding, this will set the West End’s stock riding high.” Benedict Nightingale in The Times (four stars) – “It’s now as much a phenomenon as a play … Rupert Goold gives a highly theatrical staging to the events that ended in the biggest bankruptcy in American corporate history. When I first saw his production, I wondered if he wasn’t sexing up Lucy Prebble’s text too obviously … the narrative isn’t the least unclear. I even left the theatre more or less understanding mark-to-market, if not quite mark-to-model … That a potentially dry subject is actually packed with juice is also due to the actors: Tim Pigott-Smith’s Kenneth Lay, Tom Goodman-Hill as the obsequious nerd who devises and then disowns the fiscal trickery; and, above all, Samuel West as the CEO who is now doing 24 years in jug … You shouldn’t sympathise, but you do, just a bit. Here’s a man destroyed by hubris and obsession — and, if Euripides were living, he would have relished him.” - Alex Mangini & Theo Bosanquet
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| Samuel West as Jeffrey Skilling in Enron |
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Date: 27 January 2010
How fitting that the West End transfer of Lucy Prebble’s much-lauded Enron, a play about the corruption and collapse of corporate finance, should open on the very day that the UK officially emerged from a recession caused by those very factors.
The great Samuel West leads the same cast as that which first appeared at the Chichester Minerva Theatre in July last year, then at the Royal Court in the autumn, and the company crackle with energy and wit now just as they did in each of the previous incarnations of the show.
Anthony Ward’s set looks fantastic on the larger stage of the Noel Coward Theatre after the more confined environment of the Court and Rupert Goold’s thrilling staging, complete with light sabre choreography, stalking raptors and line-dancing traders is a theatrical feast. This transfer is just what Prebble’s astoundingly mature play deserves.
- Jo Caird
NOTE: The following FOUR-STAR review dates from September 2009, and this production's run at the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.
The exciting thing about Lucy Prebble’s Enron is its revelation that there is no business like big business, and a second viewing confirms the gutsiness and vitality of her second major play, the best look at mayhem in the markets since Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money over twenty years ago.
Although recent television documentaries on the collapse of the Lehman Brothers in New York have throbbed with a quiet, chilling sense of meltdown and devastation, Rupert Goold’s endlessly inventive production moves the astonishing, hubristic creation of a shadow capitalism built on the “real” capitalism into the realms of dance and metaphor.
And at its centre is the tragic figure of the Enron president, Jeffrey Skilling, whom Samuel West brilliantly presents as a geeky, rather childish champion of the mark-to-market philosophy turning first into a predatory shark of the trading floor and then an anguished victim of his own obsessive empire-building, haunted by an accusatory refrain from his little daughter.
With its endless red ticker tape showing the share prices, the gleaming, mirage-like photographic imagery of the skyscrapers melding into the symbolic terrorist targets of eight years ago, shortly after the Enron collapse, and the neon strip lighting that becomes hand-held weaponry, Anthony Ward’s design does look a little cramped on the Court stage.
In the open airiness of the Minerva in Chichester there was a greater sense of a constellation of capitalism, and the use of boxes as rostra for the traders was more effective in a floor-level arena. But visual expression is so endemic to this show’s meaning, it’s hard to see how Goold and his team could have turned the handicap of the Court’s compactness to advantage.
Maybe they will sort this out when, after this sold-out run, Enron transfers to the Noel Coward in the New Year. The performances of Tim Pigott-Smith as the Enron owner Ken Lay and Amanda Drew as Skilling’s office lover and chief rival Claudia Roe (a fictional character) are as strong as ever.
The show is epic, noisy, colourful and cartoonish – flying directly in the face of the predominantly puritanical Royal Court aesthetic – but it’s so heatedly on the button of what happened in all of our lives, you won’t want to miss it. And watch out for Tom Goodman-Hill’s fresh-faced financial controller, Andy Fastow, a wonderful study in cunning survival and the satanic strategy skills that did for Skilling and his castle in the night sky.
- Michael Coveney
NOTE: The following FIVE-STAR review dates from July 2009, and this production's premiere at the Chichester Minerva Theatre.The story of Enron, the energy company that became, at the time, America's biggest bankruptcy, sounds so fantastic that it could have been fashioned from the pen of a particularly imaginative writer. The fact that much of this tale is true, heightens the excitement of this thrilling Headlong production, the highlight of what has been a strong Chichester season.
Lucy Prebble's morality tale is the perfect vehicle for Rupert Goold and his love of video, back projections, harsh lighting and sound effects. Goold uses every technique at his disposal to bring the the story to life – particularly in an innovative routine based on light sabres. Anthony Ward’s set is a brilliant backdrop to the events that rocked America.
At the heart of Prebble's tale is a superb performance by Samuel West as Jeffrey Skilling, the architect of the fraud. First glimpsed as a plump, gauche but ambitious executive, we see him gradually take control of Enron and enact his own fantasy of selling everything, including the weather. West captures every twitch of a man wholly driven by the need to make money, not so much for its own sake but by the need to create something innovative. Driven eventually into mental disintegration, West gives us a vision of a man driven by his obsession with Enron stock price, because, as he tells his daughter, that’s how he knows how much he’s worth.
The other leads give strong performances too. Tom Goodman-Hill is the socially inept but financially brilliant Andy Fastow, the guy who devised the scheme that brought Enron down, while Tim Pigott-Smith as Enron chairman Kenneth Lay smiles toothily and pockets the cash.
Prebble has invented a character, Claudia Roe, as the antithesis of Skilling and his machinations. Her vision of a more conventional future, based on actually manufacturing something, is rejected by Lay and after that she is used as a moral counterpoint to Skilling's schemes. I found this the least convincing part of the play, despite Amanda Drew's spiky portrayal of the snubbed Roe. It’s too neat a dramatic device; a real-life exec would have left or pocketed the cash and asked no questions.
It is however, not a documentary. Prebble leaves out several major players and her portrayal of the real-life characters is too far-fetched. In particular, Lay was an executive who had been in business for years, his life spent mired in controversy (including a previous financial scandal at Enron) - he was far from the James Stewart-like innocent of Pigott-Smith’s portrayal.
These are small quibbles: this is an outstanding production of a thought-provoking and, above all, entertaining play. Headlong is bringing Enron to the Royal Court later this year, if you miss it in Chichester, catch it there - this is a theatrical treat.
- Maxwell Cooter
