Review: Enron

AUTOPSY OF CAPITALISM

In the early 2000s, the energy giant Enron was one of America’s largest companies, whose story ended in fraudulent accounting practices. The young British author Lucy Prebble wrote a truthful play about it called Enron, which reveals the origins of the financial crisis.

Originally, Enron was supposed to make the perfect American dream come true. The mistake of the company’s CEO Kenneth Lay, played by Seppo Maijala as touchingly gullible, was to give power to the young speculator Jeffrey Skilling. Eero Ahon For Skilling, conscience is a foreign concept as he pursues ever greater profits by fraudulent means. He is assisted by Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow (the skilled Iikka Forss), whose wildest invention was Enron’s special purpose vehicles. The company’s debts were slipped into them. When the structure collapsed, 20,000 people lost their jobs and even more lost their savings.

Kari Heiskanen has directed the play for the Helsinki City Theatre with piercing perceptiveness. The direction is supported by Antti Mattila’s set design, in which the main stage has been left as an almost empty cubic white space. It is a good symbol of the cold values of money.