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.
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