Electrifying Enron at the Royal Court
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I couldn’t resist a production that superbly combines my two favorite subjects: financial markets and scandals.
Enron, running at the Royal Court Theatre in London until 7 November, promised to fulfill both of these addictions with panache.
The show is electrifying. Dramatizing the biggest corporate bankruptcy in history may not be a particularly daunting task. Staging it, on the other hand, is not so obvious (cubicles, for instance, aren’t a particularly exciting backdrop) - and this is where the scriptwriters, directors, choreographers, actors and songwriters pulled all their creative energies together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
From beginning to end, the narrative races at a dazzling pace, interrupted with song, dance, and intensive dialogue, much of which revolved around Enron’s main antagonist, Jeff Skilling. Energy traders vigorously flash hand signals during the day, and spend their nights at strip joints across the Mexican border.
The show passes with giddy excitement, as traders shout underneath neon-lit pipes, recreating the crazy energy and tunnel vision of society at that time. The play is full of cleverly thought-out touches: the banking Lehman Brothers are portrayed as double-headed; Jewish hagglers stuffed into one large pinstriped suit; Arthur Anderson is a mute ventriloquist’s dummy; and the most brilliant touch of all: red-eyed raptors from Jurassic Park, which slither across the stage, portray the structured products (or Special Purpose Vehicles,) devouring Enron’s burgeoning amounts of debt - eventually, making themselves sick off it.
Sometimes it feels like a documentary, relating highlights of the era, including the stolen 2000 U.S. Presidental Election, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and Enron’s appalling role in exacerbating the California energy crisis as the company went about cutting down power supplies and raising prices.
The playwrights incorporated ideas from behavioral economics, like how market prices often are not correlated to a company’s real value but instead on the public perception - and how investors’ reliance on their 'perception' of a company can quickly become obsessive, even parasitic, spreading like a virus through markets as traders try and out guess each other. They are compelled to guess not only what the other traders are thinking, but what other traders think other traders are thinking. The underlying value of anything, in this sphere, becomes irrelevant.
Ultimately, the decline of this larger-than-life, swaggering Texan powerhouse is a tale of humans’ extraordinary capability for self-delusion. The rotten core inside Enron may have been the unrepentant, narcissistic CEO Jeff Skilling (played by Samuel West), but the monster was allowed - even encouraged - to thrive by all the stockholders, employees, and other enablers who turned a blind eye as the stock price soared, but not one person knew exactly why. They were angry with him in the end, naturally, but they were implicitly angry for deluding themselves.
Numerous books have been written about the company Fortune magazine rated 'America’s Most Innovative Company' for six consecutive years, and the 2005 film Smartest Guys in the Room delivers all the dark humor possible in a tale where people lost not only their jobs, but also their life savings.
But after the events of the last 18 months, as tales of bankruptcies, scandals, corporate greed and excess are common enough to become almost boring, it was refreshing to return to an era before the public had become numb to these kinds of awful headlines.
Enron exemplifies a lesson that will not long be forgotten: that white-collar crime is anything but victimless. The Royal Court Theatre demonstrates this lesson with swirling neon swords - so if another 'Enron' emerges, we won’t be left in the dark.
The show is electrifying. Dramatizing the biggest corporate bankruptcy in history may not be a particularly daunting task. Staging it, on the other hand, is not so obvious (cubicles, for instance, aren’t a particularly exciting backdrop) - and this is where the scriptwriters, directors, choreographers, actors and songwriters pulled all their creative energies together to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
From beginning to end, the narrative races at a dazzling pace, interrupted with song, dance, and intensive dialogue, much of which revolved around Enron’s main antagonist, Jeff Skilling. Energy traders vigorously flash hand signals during the day, and spend their nights at strip joints across the Mexican border.
The show passes with giddy excitement, as traders shout underneath neon-lit pipes, recreating the crazy energy and tunnel vision of society at that time. The play is full of cleverly thought-out touches: the banking Lehman Brothers are portrayed as double-headed; Jewish hagglers stuffed into one large pinstriped suit; Arthur Anderson is a mute ventriloquist’s dummy; and the most brilliant touch of all: red-eyed raptors from Jurassic Park, which slither across the stage, portray the structured products (or Special Purpose Vehicles,) devouring Enron’s burgeoning amounts of debt - eventually, making themselves sick off it.
Sometimes it feels like a documentary, relating highlights of the era, including the stolen 2000 U.S. Presidental Election, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and Enron’s appalling role in exacerbating the California energy crisis as the company went about cutting down power supplies and raising prices.
The playwrights incorporated ideas from behavioral economics, like how market prices often are not correlated to a company’s real value but instead on the public perception - and how investors’ reliance on their 'perception' of a company can quickly become obsessive, even parasitic, spreading like a virus through markets as traders try and out guess each other. They are compelled to guess not only what the other traders are thinking, but what other traders think other traders are thinking. The underlying value of anything, in this sphere, becomes irrelevant.
Ultimately, the decline of this larger-than-life, swaggering Texan powerhouse is a tale of humans’ extraordinary capability for self-delusion. The rotten core inside Enron may have been the unrepentant, narcissistic CEO Jeff Skilling (played by Samuel West), but the monster was allowed - even encouraged - to thrive by all the stockholders, employees, and other enablers who turned a blind eye as the stock price soared, but not one person knew exactly why. They were angry with him in the end, naturally, but they were implicitly angry for deluding themselves.
Numerous books have been written about the company Fortune magazine rated 'America’s Most Innovative Company' for six consecutive years, and the 2005 film Smartest Guys in the Room delivers all the dark humor possible in a tale where people lost not only their jobs, but also their life savings.
But after the events of the last 18 months, as tales of bankruptcies, scandals, corporate greed and excess are common enough to become almost boring, it was refreshing to return to an era before the public had become numb to these kinds of awful headlines.
Enron exemplifies a lesson that will not long be forgotten: that white-collar crime is anything but victimless. The Royal Court Theatre demonstrates this lesson with swirling neon swords - so if another 'Enron' emerges, we won’t be left in the dark.
Here Is The Writer : The Black Swan
The Black Swan left her job as a derivatives trader in the City of London to become an author and financial journalist. Having escaped, she found that while you can take the girl out of the City, you can never take the City out of the girl. She writes a blog about economics, business, culture and, of course, the City's latest gossip. To read more, click here.
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