Review: Enron
Enron leads us to the oddities of the business world
The Helsinki City Theatre’s play is both an entertaining and serious lesson in the accounting scandal and bankruptcy, which are still topical today.
Creativity and innovation are still fashionable words in the business world. The case of the American energy company Enron is a cautionary example of the fact that these are not always all positive things.
Kari Heiskanen’s play Enron at the Helsinki City Theatre presents the events of Enron in the 1990s and early 2000s as they actually happened. A particularly creative and innovative character is Jeffrey Skilling, Executive Vice President and CEO of EnronOnline, who is brilliantly played by Eero Aho.
Skilling introduced a new accounting practice to the company, in which estimated future capital gains were recorded in advance as realised. Enron was the first company to receive permission from the US Financial Markets Authority to do so. Another genius was CFO Andrew Fastow (Ilkka Forss), who came up with the idea of cleaning up losses into separate companies, which were like nested puppets of earth.
Other “creative” ways of doing things included shutting down power plants to drive down the price of electricity in the context of California’s energy crisis, and promising to broadcast movies via broadband. The promise was empty because there was no technical capacity for it. Everything was aimed at constantly raising the share price, which the company succeeded brilliantly in for a long time.
Detaching the financial world from the real economy
Enron’s story is dramatic enough in itself that bringing it to the stage doesn’t require any gimmicks. The script by British author Lucy Prebble reportedly follows the real events quite closely, including many lines. There is no unnecessary self-emphasis in the City Theatre’s performance either, but the viewer’s attention is drawn to the story itself – to what really happened. This is made possible by the professionalism of guidance and other implementation.
Skilling declares that concreteness, such as gas pipelines, is no longer needed in business: it is enough to operate with numbers alone. The play’s set design has also been stripped of any extra concreteness. In the background of the space, which resembles the company’s spacious lobby, there is a board on which a curve depicting Enron’s share price is drawn in red. However, the concrete and the outside world do not leave this bubble alone.
The enthusiastic and dynamic Skilling has a Darwinian mindset: let the market decide who succeeds and who doesn’t. However, market forces eventually turn against him and Enron. On stage, the market is represented by dinosaur figurines, reminiscent of Raptor 1, a special purpose company founded by Fastow.
At the end of the play, it is reminded that the largest bankruptcy in the history of the United States nine years ago is still relevant: similar financial systems and bubbles were also behind the latest financial crisis.
The play gives plenty of food for thought about the basic questions of the economy and society. It is like a lesson in how mass suggestions in economic life are born, swelled and erupt. And it’s not easy to get bored in this lesson.
Leaders in their own worlds
The story focuses on the hustle and bustle on the top floor of the company. In the end, a couple of employees who have lost everything also get to speak. It’s like they’re from a different world: the leaders don’t understand them. The same is the attitude of the leaders after the bankruptcy in connection with the Senate hearings. The superhumans of the business world are not bothered by the trivialities of the public sector.
The play makes you think about what a society is like that produces such people and ways of working. Could things also be different?
One important additional element to the work is Skilling’s little daughter (Maija Kuparinen / Elsa Brotherus), whose “why” questions question the status quo. “You’re funny,” he announces to his father, who is counting millions and billions. Emperor Money has no clothes?