Enron

It's odd: I put up a review a few days ago, entirely inoffensively agreeing with the one review that has been allowed to stay here. I didn't like enron - it just told the story, rather inelegantly and prosaically. And some bits - like the Lehman brothers in a suit - just didn't work. I usually keep my Royal Court scripts but this one went in the bin on the way out... Anyway, this, and another excellent review were taken off the site. What's wrong time out? Do you not like it when your reader's feedback doesn't agree with you? I don't want to mention the C word but I think we should be told! alex

For all of the fevered fuss about this play, and I am an ardent fan of all the Royal Court does, thinking Jerusalem was a remarkable theatrical achievement - I cant help but feel the critics have lost the plot when it comes to Enron. Bar, the moments of musical explosion, this play amounts to nothing other than a description of Enron's corrupt imploding. There is no humanity in it, there is no sense of any interpretation of the events, the key characters simply walk about this economics history lesson not being moved or effected on any deep level. Like the world it depicts, everything occurs on the surface. I wonder whether the reason everyone is fauning over this show is because it simply enables the audience to have a comprehensible grasp on the logic of hedge funds. So, in a sense, we leave feeling we have learnt something - but as for any clever extrapolating of what Enron's collapse means or meant for the human condition - well none occurs. A much better play would have been to present the ways in which EVERY single person on the planet was culpable in the collapse of huge capitalist institutions - NOT a woman at a funeral rather painfully asking for an apology about her lost $150,000. There are two moments in the play when Lucy Prebble scratches the surface of what this play could have been. When the traders talk about trading as equivalent to hunting a man (a real living man), and when Sam West's character indicates that 'taking advantage' (in a capitalist world) really translates as simply 'earning a living'. This was a missed opportunity to make us feel responsible for and uncomfortable about our complicit part played in the economic downturn. Some of the razzamatazz moments work well - but again - the play didnt have the courage of its convictions, and fails as a caricature. Worryingly, we seem to be celebrating more and more simple straight descriptive works of art, rather than interpretive. I can see why this is transferring, and why it will also do well on Broadway. It is as shallow as the world as it depicts, simply because it does nothing other than present (with no incisive subtext) the story of Enron, rather than the further reaching implications of the philosophies held at the heart of Enron.