CityLife

Interview: Lucy Prebble (Enron)

Enron

The Lowry - October 19 to 23, 2010.

Stories of financial skullduggery leading to the collapse of economic giants, invariably followed by misery for people who are involved only innocently if at all, seem to dominate the media and have done for the last several years.

But Lucy Prebble’s Enron, a brilliantly theatrical exploration of the collapse of the American energy giant, an event which now seems to prefigure so much of our current financial woes, was by no means an attempt to write the ‘story of our times’. Indeed, she winces at the very notion.

When she first had the idea for a theatrical version of the story, she points out, the collapse of Enron looked more like an isolated scandal than the shape of things to come. For her, the whole story of the way the company rose and fell was “that most theatrical of entities, just a game, an illusion, a system of belief”.

“On an emotional level,” she says, “all my family are from the business world. My brother and sister both work for big consultancy firms. My dad was the chairman of a multinational company before he retired.

“I was the youngest child, so I suppose I was always destined to be the arty one. It wasn’t really conscious but I’m sure there is a bit of a ‘road not taken’ element, in that I often think ‘what would have happened if I’d entered that world?’ The workplace is quite under-represented in theatre, but it’s where most people spend most of their lives.”

Initially, her ambitious notion was to stage it as a musical, and that was how she pitched it to director Rupert Goold of the theatre company Headlong. Goold, though, suggested that, when she described it, she was not talking about a musical at all, but a classical tragedy.

“That was when it really came alive for me,” Lucy recalls. “We don’t have those kings and emperors, who are the stuff of traditional tragedy, any more but corporate CEOs are probably the closest we come to it. They were making decisions that affect millions of lives, and they were often undone, as we have seen, by greed and worse.

“What is extraordinary about what we’re seeing now,” she says, “is that we had all watched this happen with Enron nearly a decade before and yet still we wanted to believe in the illusion of financial miracles.

“There was a criminality in that faith and I suppose we were all, to an extent, guilty of it.”

The show itself is a remarkable and spectacular piece of high-energy entertainment, which tackles head-on the idea that plays about finance and politics are bound to be dour, didactic affairs.

Here the tale is dazzlingly told through song, dance and visual effects, including the depiction of accounting tricks as businessmen with raptor heads and the Lehman Brothers as a pair of conjoined twins. Prebble’s first play, Liquid, which follows graduates forsaking their dreams for jobs in management consultancy, was written while she was a student at Sheffield University .

“I had written short stories and terrible poetry so I thought, ‘why not?’. My structure was terrible,” she laughs at the memory. Nonetheless, it won her an award at the National Student Drama Festival and, after enrolling on a writers’ course, she wrote The Sugar Syndrome. Directed by Royal Exchange alumnus Marianne Elliott, it opened at the Royal Court in 2003 and won her a Critics’ Circle Drama award for ‘most promising playwright’. She then adapted Secret Diary Of A Call Girl, based on a book of blog posts by a London escort, for ITV.

“We had a wonderful dominatrix who trained Billie Piper with a whip,” she tells me delightedly.

Her preparation for Enron was decidedly less racy.

“I surrounded myself with books about the energy business. Then I contacted the people involved, but not the principal players because some are in prison and one is dead.

“What you come to realise, really, is that a lot of what went on made no sense even to the people who were trading it. People were mesmerised by the numbers.

“I decided there’s no point in writing a drama where you condemn everybody and say,  ‘isn’t making money bad?’ The delusion that goes on in all of us is what makes it fascinating.

“My first rule is ‘do not bore – Enron is not about numbers and economics’. I thought, ‘Let’s do it with lots of swearing, hyper-masculinity and light-sabres’. If you watch a trading floor, it’s one of the most theatrical places, yet belief in it is kind of the religion behind our society. So it’s odd that that world hardly ever makes it into a theatre.

“The things I’ve most enjoyed working on Enron are about
illusion,” she says. “A lot of finance is about making something appear profitable.

“You can get your naturalism in other media. Theatre should be something you can’t get anywhere else.”