Some of The Effect’s most compelling scenes are watching the couple fall for each other. Their interactions are heady, silly, erratic and desperate – an intoxicating reminder of the rush and agony of first love. “What I found moving about that section, and love in general, is just how cliché love is. At one point they say, ‘Where shall we live?’ It’s something lovers over millennia have said to each other, yet it still retains the same meaning, it doesn’t feel worn out. As a writer, I find that crazy.” Initially I was worried that their powerhouse production was in danger of overwhelming Prebble’s text through overkill. The first half, in which you gradually get to know the main players, blurred some of the narrative issues through an excess of stage business and visual affects. At times it almost appeared that Goold had lost confidence in the text and was impelled to gussy up the exposition in case the audience grew bored with its boardroom politics. a b Thorpe, Vanessa (29 April 2018). "Spies, assassins and strip clubs: death of Alexander Litvinenko adapted for stage". TheGuardian.com. Historically, theatre has always been alert to the paradoxes of capitalism. Marx famously quoted Timon of Athens in Das Kapital, for showing what happened when "the cold cash nexus" replaced true human relationships. Ibsen portrayed the self-delusion of a Napoleon of commerce in John Gabriel Borkman; Harley Granville Barker's The Voysey Inheritance is a classic study of pre-Maxwell criminal fraud, in which a solicitor speculates with his clients' money. If theatre is to engage seriously with capitalism, however, it is not enough simply to stand up and denounce it. As Prebble realises, you have to capture its dangerous lure and even empathise with its protagonists. "When I first talked to Ben Power [Headlong's dramaturg, who helped develop the play] about this project," she says, "we agreed that most of us have an ambivalent response to capitalism, and that even left-leaning liberals like iPods and jeans and all the things it provides. There's not much point in writing about a financial bubble unless you want to spend time within that bubble. You also have to try and create a tragic hero with whom you may not agree, but who is dramatically magnetic. It's what Shaw did with Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, and Tony Kushner with Roy Cohn in Angels in America. And it's what I've tried to do with Jeffrey Skilling. I learned that he used to wake up at four in the morning thinking of all the pressure on him. I found it easy to relate to that since I used to do exactly the same when I was younger, thinking of all the lies I'd told and fantasies I'd created."

Plus, it’s fast paced and full of lively characters. I had a hard time putting it down. It makes a complex, boring financial story interesting and understandable. deeply human, with the odd jolt of piercing humour. The Effect confirms her as one of the most intelligent voices in British theatre.” – Enron's 1998 Annual Report '"ruthlessness, callousness and arrogance don't belong here"removed by 2000' It has all the elements of a great play … except one. I don’t think it really breaks through the surface of the story. The characters have flesh, the plot is excellent, but what does it all mean? Bashing Enron and its leaders is not hard to do – they’re all crooks after all. Is the play an indictment of all capitalism (especially the American variety)? Or is there something unique about these characters and this situation? Having unraveled the complexities of the case, the play doesn’t really leave the reader/viewer with anything other than “those guys are crooks” or “capitalism is all a fraud,” and both are gross oversimplifications. Personally, I look at capitalism like I look at democracy. It’s the worse form of economics except for all the others. In telling the now familiar story of how, in 15 years, Enron, a Texas-based energy company, grew from nothing to become America’s 7th largest company, employing 21,000 people in 40 countries, and how, through creative accounting, debt concealment and fraudulent dealings, they became the architects of the corporate world’s biggest scandal to date, the show’s creative team have made a theatrical killing.Goold's immaculate staging, Anthony Ward's design and Scott Ambler's movement illustrate the whirling kaleidoscopic energy that is part of the dream. But Prebble also creates plausible people, and Samuel West is hugely impressive as the self-deluded Skilling. It is difficult to feel sympathy for such a man, whose deregulation policies did so much damage, but West reminds us of the global complicity in money worship. Amanda Drew as his rival, Tim Pigott-Smith as Enron's avuncular founder, and Tom Goodman-Hill as the greed-driven Fastow, haunted by the scaly raptors which symbolise the shadow-companies, are also first-rate.

The comedy of that "why?", perhaps a legacy of her own childhood, informs every line of Prebble's play. This afternoon she has been watching the cast rehearse a scene about an "Enron death weekend" in which the bonus-heavy execs got to ride team-building dune buggies. "We were doing this vroom vroom stuff with chairs and so on," she explains, "but of course all the guys got completely into it, and all the girls, me and the assistant directors and a few others, kind of looked on. Some giggled and thought it was hilarious, and some tried seriously to analyse it, wondered what it meant." This one doesn’t seem as entirely resistant to cliché as my favourite Prebble play, The Effect – the scenes in the third act featuring the prostitute and the woman who’s lost her savings seeming oddly on-the-nose – but judging a theatrical production by its script is like judging an album by reading the lyrics booklet, so it may play differently in person. More daring still was the clinical trial she took part in while writing The Effect over a decade ago, despite her source inspiration being the infamous 2006 UK Parexel drug trial that sent six of the eight volunteers into intensive care with organ failure. Wasn’t she terrified? “I only stayed for a bit of it, but, it’s interesting, I’ve always had this thing where I feel safer when I’m doing something risky.” Jones, Kenneth. "'Enron', a Theatrical Dissection of a Famous Crime, Opens on Broadway" Playbill, 27 April 2010Prebble doesn’t fail to remind her audience of the timeliness of the production, as the list of Enron’s rivals doubles as a list of banks and corporations that went to the wall when the current financial crisis broke. Particular fun is had with the Lehman brothers, who appear on stage together, three-legged, wearing a single trench coat. Enron (stylised as ENRON) is a 2009 play by the British playwright Lucy Prebble, based on the Enron scandal. [1] Productions [ edit ] Enron at the Noël Coward Theatre in London's West End Hare cryptically reveals that his own questioning self will be represented as a character on stage. It seems fair to assume, on past form, that he will be critical of a government response that, as George Monbiot has written, has consisted of giving our money to the people who caused the crisis in the first place. Hare says: "I'm trying to break through the protective attitudes of the bankers, who argue that it was a recession just like any other, that we have to reconstitute the system as it was and that there is no need to question or examine the very basis of capitalism. It was Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, who admitted that 'the whole intellectual framework has collapsed'. That's what I'm trying to explore."

The centrepiece of Hampstead Theatre's autumn New Writing Festival will be the playwright's first full length work, What Fatima Did ..., about a Muslim girl returning to school after the summer holidays.Lucy Prebble’s new play at the Royal Court Theatre charts the rise and fall of the Enron corporation, whose spectacular demise in 2001 provided a foretaste of last year’s financial crisis. The 40 best plays to read before you die". The Independent. 18 August 2019 . Retrieved 16 April 2020. Enron features strong language, violence, scenes of a sexual nature, discrimination and references to incidents of terrorism.