Enron
by Lucy Prebble
Writing
a play about a corporate business collapse is perhaps not the easiest task in
the world. Enron may have been the biggest corporate collapse, but it is still
not an easy topic to explain in a couple of hours of drama. That Enron
has won great reviews and enough ‘bums on seats’ to set up the current second
London run before it returns to Chichester, from where it started, is tribute
indeed.
So how do they do it?
Fundamentally by setting up a series of short, snappy scenes where the principal characters are allowed to transform into easy caricatures. I would say that we need to know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, but actually there are no good guys. If we add a bit of humour, the occasional song and dance, a video of an Enron commercial and some spectacular staging, and we have a fabulous piece of drama.
My personal knowledge of Enron, what it was, what happened to it and why is pretty sketchy. Luckily we went with Julian and Pete, both of whom work in the City, or at least its edges, who helped evaluate the story we were told. The puppet master is Ken Lay, played in a folksy GOP way by Tim Pigott Smith. We are led to believe that he maintains a ‘See no evil, hear no evil’ position as he hands over operational control of the successful company to Jeffrey Skilling, brilliantly played by Samuel West. Skilling wants modernity, virtuality, pure, theoretical market capitalism. The opposition is provided by Claudia Roe (Amanda Drew) and Birks kindly tells me that she is in fact based on Rebecca Mark. She holds to the old fashioned idea that an energy company ought to supply some energy, have pipes or wires or even power plants. Eventually she is seen off and Enron enters uncharted territory, a virtual energy giant.
The other central character is the rather darker Andy Fastow
(Tom Goodman-Hill). He is the one who dreams up the complex financial
arrangement of Russian dolls, whereby all the risk is transported to another
company which is almost entirely owned by Enron, and that risk is shipped to
another company which is 
almost
entirely owned by Enron, for ever and ever (virtually). The debt is eaten by
Raptors (another spurious financial procedure, but in the play they really are
raptors!) and everything is fine. So it appears to be. Enron gets bigger and
richer and bigger and richer. Its share price hits ever more dizzying heights.
But Skilling is finally worried. Enron has no money.
This was the bit I needed the help on. At the start we learn that Enron goes onto Mark to Market, an accounting system which allows the expected profit from a deal to be added to the balance sheet before the real profit is actually accrued. You don’t’ have to wait for the gains of a future business deal, you get them now. Interestingly enough, this is not spurious virtual finance spam, but is now standard practice (God help us all). The downside is if those potential profits fail to materialise, they become real losses and obviously the share price will go down. Maintaining the share price is all.
There are a raft of support characters, my favourite being Lehman Brothers who are played as Siamese twins, and the ventriloquist from Arthur Anderson. In the end everyone passes the buck and in the final end, as we know, everything collapses.
The final sequences feel long, but are probably important to include. We see the real (not virtual) pain and misery caused by the company’s collapse, the retribution handed out to Skilling and Fastow. But we also hear Skilling’s very passionate defence. In the end he really does not think he has done anything wrong, but is rather a genius who has understood how markets work better than anyone else. In 20 years time, he suggests, his view will be orthodox.
Perhaps. But for now it remains a sobering lesson, and the only genius is director Rupert Goold who somehow makes this sad tale of obscure financial instruments a hugely entertaining (if troubling) evening.