Review: Enron

A Brief Syllabus of Darwinian Economics

Enron by the young English playwright Lucy Prebble is a play about the bankrupt Texas energy company Enron and its executives Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow and Kenneth Lay, who are guilty of a major scam.

While writing the play, Prebble has not stopped to think about the motives of his characters. Man is simply a greedy bastard and has an onion. Reality speaks for the fact that we, the heirs of Adam, are villains possessed by original sin.

However, the thin portraits do not prevent director Kari Heiskanen from conjuring up captivating theatre from Prebble’s text. Eero Aho, Iikka Forss, Milka Ahlroth and Seppo Maijala , who achieve amazing performances, bring to the stage with their presence the elements that are not written into the text itself.

The requirement factor of the performance has been further increased with staging solutions. An empty space the size of a basketball court has been built on the large stage of the City Theatre with the help of white-painted walls, the only set of which is a white sofa slouching in one corner at the beginning of the play.
During the play, this immense empty space quickly fills up with the viewer’s own imagination. The performance is very intense and captivating.

The empty stage is certainly also a good allegory of the suggestive creativity with which Skilling made the world’s best-educated stock market analysts and bankers believe in his shenanigans against common sense for almost ten years.