This one doesn’t seem as entirely resistant to cliché as my favourite Prebble play, The Effect – the scenes in the third act featuring the prostitute and the woman who’s lost her savings seeming oddly on-the-nose – but judging a theatrical production by its script is like judging an album by reading the lyrics booklet, so it may play differently in person. There are bastards in the boardroom and raptors in the basement, as the company begins to eat its own debt, drunk on insane free market economics, and engineering blackouts across California. It was one of the most successful smoke and mirror shows in business history so it makes sense that Lucy Prebble's play would be built upon the thrill of the illusion, creating a spectacle so large and impossible to hate that it gave the world rose tinted glasses. It was definitely a unique way of telling a real live event and it definitely got the point across about how this company ended up where it ended up.

i will definitely be reading again - mostly because i ahve to, the play won't revise itself - but i am sure i will emjoy it a second time. I haven't been including many plays in my reading challenges lately so I figure I would change that and begin with this one. But no serious play on Broadway can survive a withering attack from The New York Times, which carries the force of a papal indictment". It features rather naturalistic dialogue alongside the appearance of prehistoric raptors, a board of directors wearing pig heads, Siamese twin Lehman Brothers, ventriloquist and dummy Arthur Anderson, and so forth.

Equal parts low comedy and high tragedy, this fast moving play will hold your attention like a gruesome train wreck.

Goold's immaculate staging, Anthony Ward's design and Scott Ambler's movement illustrate the whirling kaleidoscopic energy that is part of the dream. Inspired by real events, but told as a sprawling, dynamic tragedy, the play follows CEO and anti-hero Jeffrey Skilling through the journey of Enron’s rise and fall. This is definitely one of the best plays I’ve read, so much thought and humour went into every scene. In The New York Times review of the Broadway production, Ben Brantley wrote, contrary to some other critics, "even with a well-drilled cast that includes bright Broadway headliners like Norbert Leo Butz and Marin Mazzie, the realization sets in early that this British-born exploration of smoke-and-mirror financial practices isn’t much more than smoke and mirrors itself.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Though it happened in my lifetime, I knew next to nothing about the Enron scandal before reading this play.I found the characters quite fascinating and how they justified their actions, and i had never heard of enron. I thought it was too short, as there seemed to be a build up of the rivalry between Roe and Skilling, but it ended quickly when she was fired. It's definitely not for everyone (as witnessed by how badly the play bombed on Broadway, closing after less than a month, even with the lovely Norbert Leo Butz in the leading role) but for those with an open mind and a willingness to go with the flow, ENRON is unlike anything in modern theatre. After the high praise earned in Chichester, there was always the lurking fear the Enron bubble might burst on transfer. It plays like farce, yet it accurately portrays the fraudulent shenanigans that were behind the scandal.

Thus the complicity of market analysts in Enron's over-evaluation is captured by turning them into a close-harmony troupe. Enron was premiered in Reykjavik City Theatre in September 2010, in Dublin as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in October 2010 and in Helsinki (Helsinki City Theatre) in November 2010.Prime mover is Jeffrey Skilling: a Marlovian over-reacher who boldly announces "we're not just an energy company, we're a powerhouse for ideas". Directed by Rupert Goold with associate Sophie Hunter, the scenic and costume design was by Anthony Ward, lighting by Mark Henderson, music and sound by Adam Cork, video and projection by Jon Driscoll and movement by Scott Ambler. The people in here are so bad as to be one-dimensional caricatures, which I suppose is partly the point Prebble is making.