Blunt instrument

Enron
Noël Coward

Fool for Love
Riverside

With Enron, the playwright Lucy Prebble has picked an almighty task. The Texas fuel giant collapsed in 2000 with $30 billion worth of debt, which at the time was the largest bankruptcy in the history of money. The firm’s bosses flipped through the almanac of bent accountancy and lighted on a hoary old swindle. A shadow company was created to buy up their loss-making assets thus boosting profit margins and forcing the stock price skywards. To get the auditors to sign off the paperwork Enron simply bribed them. Anyone hoping to find any ingenuity or sophisticated elegance in the fraud will be disappointed. Money is a very blunt instrument in this play.

So is the writer’s technique. Playwrights usually shape their work from three components: compelling characters, an intriguing mission, an uncertain outcome. Prebble does the opposite. Her characters are gruesome stiffs, their aims are despicable and the ending is a foregone conclusion. All sympathy, all suspense are eradicated from the start. The Enron board is full of clichés in dated clothing. Sam West plays the main fraudster, Jeffrey Skilling, as a cold, arrogant, greedy, three-quarters-autistic woodentop. His boss, Ken Lay, is more likeable but scarcely more engaging, a chortling buffoon played with desperate eagerness by Tim Pigott-Smith. The love interest comes from Amanda Drew as the boardroom bimbo who wears the full Big Bang rig of pencil skirt, black heels, scarlet tunic and bundles of blonde hair. Because she’s as greedy and manipulative as Skilling we don’t feel involved in their boardroom fumblings. Her character, though prominent in Act I, is clumsily discarded after the break.

When Prebble gains experience she’ll learn to husband her characters more artfully than this.