Alissia Bevan - The Founder

16 The Founder | Wednesday 21 October 2009
E X T R A
Enron
The Royal Court
Theatre, then Noel
Coward Theatre as of
January 2010
Arts/Music
Love to Make Noise
Presents…
Bass Clef//Gallops//
Tabloid Vivant
Julia Armfield
I think in prefacing this possibly
over-surprised review of Robert
Goold’s new production of Lucy
Prebble’s Enron, it might just be
as well to explain that, previously
to rocking up to the Royal Court,
Chelsea, with my Sloane-antenna
working overtime, I had already
been a witness to Goold’s frankly
bewildering National Theatre
production of Priestley’s Time and
the Conways and that, as such, my
expectations were hardly sky high.
(I haven’t the space to go into it, but
I will say that, from my experience,
no production of An Inspector
Calls has ever benefited from the
addition of high-camp dance montages
and inexplicable five-minute
freeze frames, so I’m not really
sure why Goold felt Time and the
Conways should be any different).
Suffice it to say, I was to be more
than pleasantly surprised.
The play itself hardly seems the
most likely of prospects, especially
if, like me, you don’t know what’s
going on in your own bank account
half the time, let alone the
lofty heights of corporate finance.
Enron, the energy company which,
by the time it filed for bankruptcy
in December 2001, owed over $60
billion in debt, was part of one
of America’s greatest corporate
scandals and its collapse resulted
in the loss of more than 20,000
jobs, $1.2 billion worth of pensions,
the destruction of America’s most
venerable accounting firm, three
convictions, one fatal heart attack,
a suicide and the longest prison
sentence yet handed down for
corporate crime. The play charts the
rise and fall of the company and its
CEO, Jeff Skilling (Sam West), over
the course of the eighties, nineties
and early noughties, detailing the
changes in procedure and clashes in
personality which eventually led to
this historical collapse.
With a wickedly sharp, yet
surprisingly accessible script
from Prebble, Goold has created a
production which operates like a
frenzied Carnival of the Animals,
dragged ceaselessly from situation
to situation by the unrelenting pace
of its own inevitability. The set is a
wide grey blur, stock prices reeling
constantly across the backdrop as
the company develops below. Enron
Chairman Kenneth Lay (played
with a folksy ruthlessness by Tim
Pigott-Smith) takes a paternal backseat
to Sam West’s business whiz
Skilling, allowing him to instigate
his ideas of mark-to-market trading
and selling energy at projected
prices, just as Skilling later takes
advice from Tom Goodman-Hill’s
nervy company underling Andrew
Fastow to set up fake, purposemade
companies in which to hide
away the mounting debt eventually
brought about by these very ideas.
Sam West is superb, doing his usual
trick of making his character simultaneously
unpleasant yet alarmingly
easy to sympathise with, whilst
Goodman-Hill creates a compelling
dichotomy of a seemingly likable
family man carried away with
his own brilliance and greed. The
atmosphere is claustrophobic, the
dialogue at once dramatic and clinical.
The characters operate within
a bubble of personal hubris and
thrill-seeking even as the debts rise
and the political scene shifts further
and further from their favour.
The direction is shamelessly expressionistic
and the use of Papier-
Mâché heads is high. It’s Time and
the Comways all over again, but
to stunningly different effect. Up
above, suited businessmen appear
disguised as three blind mice and
the Lehman Brothers appear as
a pair of comically incompetent
Siamese twins. Down below, Fastow
lurks in an increasingly jungle-like
office basement, surrounded by the
fake companies, or “raptors”, created
to hide away the company debt.
These raptors, though they start
purely as ideas, cleverly symbolised
as eggs in Fastow’s desk drawer,
quickly develop very literally into
strange dinosaur-like figures which
prowl about upstage, consuming
more and more debt before, eventually,
turning on each other. “Clever
girl” Fastow mutters when these
creatures first emerge, eerily echoing
a line uttered by a character
in Jurassic Park, right before he is
savaged by his own charges.
The whole impact of the play
hinges on artifice; the elaborate
costumes, the swirling lights, those
high-camp dance montages Goold
loves so much. A Greek Chorus of
businessmen shout and line dance,
a barbershop quartet of Enron
traders sings the share prices of
Aluminium and Orange Juice,
but it’s really all just a lot of noise.
Skelling’s daughter, a sweet little
girl in an old-fashioned pinafore,
blows bubbles along the back of the
stage as the madness intensifies,
her ringing repetitions of “why?”
the only voice of dissent as everyone
else, hidden away within their
own financial bubbles, refuses to
see the warning signs of oncoming
catastrophe.
Everything about this production,
with its marked lack of cohesion
and clash of theatrical styles, is
stage business and show, yet the circus
it creates is grey and unchanging
beneath all the razzle dazzle.
The issues raised, given our current
financial situation, are uncannily
timely, the problems canvassed
depressingly similar to those that
seem to have caused the problems
all over again. Greed, hubris and
unregulated speculation fuel every
scene and every speech and even as
Skilling is sentenced to twenty-four
years in jail for multiple federal
felony charges, his words are still
words of justification:
“All our creations are here. There’s
greed, there’s fear, joy, faith, hope,
and the greatest of these is money.”.
The crimes are paid for, the lights
and the dancing finished with, yet
from where Prebble chooses to
leave us, it is very hard to see exactly
what, if anything, has changed.
8th October 2009
Live at
Tommy’s Bar
Jack William Ingram
Music Editor
Ill-timed, perhaps, for those of
us still in the midst of mid-week
drudgery, but for the dedicated
hipsters who plodded gamely down
to Tommy’s Bar last Thursday eve,
the latest Love To Make Noise gig
proved to be a most compelling
distraction.
Noteworthy local group and
LTMN stalwarts Tabloid Vivant
kick-started proceedings and
endeared themselves to an as-yet
sober crowd with colourful mantras
and fervent Morrissey posturings.
A song probably called “Peter” displayed
an acute lyricism, capturing
nostalgia for off-kilter days spent
furtively smoking cigarettes and
staying up far past one’s bedtime.
Musical instruments were handed
back and forth amongst the group
– a violin here, a ukulele there.
Their sound is, as to be expected, a
little rough around the edges, but
charming, nonetheless.
A warm glow descended over
the crowd following Tabloid
Vivant’s pleasant lo-fi set. I was
little prepared then, as Wrexham
3-piece Gallops blasted uncompromising
bottom-heavy post-rock
into the unsuspecting synapses of
all present. Gallops’ music possesses
the frenetic percussiveness
of a band led from the drum seat,
never quite moving beyond a chugging
4/4 impetus, yet marrying an
unrelenting sonic heaviness with
laptop electronica and unquestionable
musicianship. There’s an
honest intensity to this music, a
million miles away from the ambitious
soundscapes or bombastic
psychedelica typical of post-rock,
dwelling instead with the pure force
of the riff and the raw physicality
of the dance floor. I advise readers
to check out “Oh, the Manatee”
on Gallops’ MySpace page to get a
sense of what the group is capable
of, although don’t expect anything
comparable to the dynamism of live
performance.
The LTMN in-house DJs were,
as always, on top form, spiralling
hard-edged beats across a receptive
dance floor and exhibiting a diverse
array of sounds from the undoubtedly
extensive Love to Make Noise
archives.
Headline act Bass Clef reasserted
the primacy of the lower register.
The aesthetic was minimal – just a
man, a drum machine, a Theremin,
a trombone and inexplicable cowbell
– but the sound itself was immense.
This was dub-gone-wrong;
riddim smeared sideways and up
the walls; analogue electronica that
probed some dark recesses and
showed no mercy. The occasional
ambient interlude demonstrated
the freshness of the production, as
Mr Clef ’s magic FX box introduced
a sonic character that a soulless
laptop could never emulate.
LTMN’s inaugural event has
set the bar pretty high. I certainly
look forward to additional events
of this calibre occurring in future,
and seeing more of their off-centre
acts infiltrating the Royal Holloway
music scene. The initiated are urged
to direct their web browsers thusly:
http://lovetomakenoise.wordpress.com/