Morning morning, although actually it’s very soon to being afternoon. I am finding it quite difficult to sit down and write my blog this week, mainly I think because the cultural activity in question took place last Thursday and my god am I expected to remember anything intelligent from 4 days ago??? I can’t alas, physically can’t so apologies in advance for what I am about to write, it’s always bullocks anyway so no biggie. I’m also in the process of attempting to eat porridge, or cum of the devil as it should be known, as my wisdom tooth is once more causing me issues so my take on Enron may become increasingly soured as this write-up progresses.
Right, last week I had the great fortune of being invited by the lovely Zarah to see Enron, a production currently running at The Noel Coward Theatre. These tickets were a gift to the lovely Zarah from her brother and luckily for me the boyfriend had a prior engagement so she invited me instead!! Yay for being the back up plan to boyfriends! Anyway they were basically the best seats I have EVER HAD at the theatre, usually “preferring” the cheapo scabby tickets with restricted view in the gods or whatever. Here we were second row from the front in the grand circle and I had an aisle seat so my knees weren’t in blistering pain from the first 30 minutes onwards!! The man with the largest head on earth sitting in front of me and squirming throughout is not going to get a mention – I hate him too much and his big fat retarded meat head doesn’t deserve any more of my time. What a pretty theatre the Noel Coward is though, can’t remember going there before, although in fairness the view is probably very different 50 foot up at the back. Also the whole experience is just so different in the posho seats – for example I walked straight out and into the nice loos in the foyer rather than having to queue for the entire interval outside the typical 1 cubicle provided for the chavs upstairs. AND, it’s been so long since I have been to the theatre as opposed to the opera or the ballet that I forgot you can take booze in there with you. Bonus!
Enron is the contemporary play/music dance spectacle charting the rise and fall of the energy company Enron, which collapsed at the beginning of the naughties due to massive amounts of fraud. Now, I know lots of appropriate sounding phrases and terms about finance and fraud and stuff but clearly I don’t know the accurate meanings of any of these terms and it would be no doubt rather unwise therefore to start using them now. So, in advance, apologies for my horrendous layman’s language or complete avoidance of any appropriate sounding classifications as I am clearly not going to get the intricacies of this situation. However, the play did do remarkably well at simplifying the facts for the tiny minds of people like me, at points perhaps glossing over things or leaving quite big holes in the audiences understanding, I suppose just because it gets too damn complicated.
The production was a mix of straight drama/comedy with some chorus style singing and dancing, again in a rather comedy fashion, and definitely not as much as I was lead to believe there would be. I would definitely class this as a play above any kind of musical or sound experience or whatever crap the press want to define it as. There was also a certain amount of video footage of things like the Bill Clinton sex scandal, the election of Bush, the fall of the twin towers etc, although at no point would I say this made it a ‘video experience’ as defined again by the press material. I wonder if all the hyped ‘singing dancing extravaganza’ stuff is partly why it apparently received such rubbish reviews in New York as opposed to its reception in London. If I went there expecting a polished musical satire I would have been disappointed. There was very little of the singing/dancing for one thing and the pieces they did do, although I felt successful for what they were, weren’t overly original or, well, polished. This makes it appear as if I didn’t enjoy these segments, which I most definitely did, in fact I probably could have done with more of hem, but I think if you make the choice to do things like that you should fully commit and do it all the way, not just a token dance scene at the beginning and one half way though or what have you. Make it a full on musical spectacular – that doesn’t mean you can’t also have the straight stuff as well. I also think these not un-crude pieces would have seemed even more underwhelming on the Broadway stage, which in my head is always twice as big as anything on at the west end. This production needs a small setting so as not to become dwarfed, it feels pretty intimate and I think it would have appeared jarring on a larger scale.
So, the story; It all begins at an office party where the central character Jeffrey Skilling is introduced as a new recruit for the company Enron, based in Huston, Texas. He is very upset about people not understanding something called mark to market, why I don’t know but hey once again the writer did a damn successful job of explaining it in a coherent and simplified manner for me to be able to understand with my more than shoddy grasp of finance! Thus begins a seemingly short lived power struggle between Jeffrey and Claudia Roe, another high flyer in the company. Claudia wants to continue building power plants and pipes, producing the oil and gas which made the company big. Jeffrey wants to make it an ‘energy’ company, ditching the production and instead building a trade floor. If I understood business, finance or in fact anything at this point I would carry on but I don’t so I won’t. Jeffrey and Claudia are also shagging, although as their rivalry increases that soon stops. There was a particularly odd line near the beginning after they have been doing it on the desk – they talk about the future of the company, about how Ken the president or owner or whatever was soon to step down and appoint a new president. At this point Claudia requests a tissue from Jeffrey as she ‘appears to be leaking/dripping’?!?!?!!??!?? WTF???? I think they were attempting to set the quasi-comedy tone.
Time goes by, Jeffrey becomes the golden child as stock prices soar and Claudia is gradually beaten to the sides, still stuck in the pre Jeffrey company mind set. Jeffrey sees the future and it is greedy. He sees there is money to be made but his company, priced on high hopes and expectations is failing to make the money that is predicted and is slowly sinking into debt (I think). Step in the nerdy deliberately putrid character of Andrew Fastow, soon to be made CFO, who comes up with a genius way of hiding the bad debt through financial loopholes – namely the creation of a fake company made almost entirely of Enron shares, or stock or whatever it’s called, to swallow the debt. As long as the share prices don’t slip, for some reason, then everything will be fine forever!! (yeah right). Locked in his increasingly dank and gloomy basement the character of Andy becomes more and more that of the crazy mad scientist, alone with his freakish Frankenstein style creations which are slowly starting to take control. These fake companies are represented as weird dinosaur type creatures who skulk around creepily with demonic red eyes. As the play continues their presence becomes more and more sinister as Andy continues to feed and pet them, referring to them like his babies, mourning for them as they get increasingly sick, fed too many bad shares.
The hey-days are becoming an increasingly distant memory as paranoia and fear start to creep into Jeffrey’s mind, Ken knows something’s up but doesn’t want to know too much, Claudia is long gone on a train of bitterness and recrimination, the wolves are drawing in and he knows it. A seemingly disastrous foray into the now deregulated electricity market in the state of California leads to rolling black-outs and share prices slowly starting to drop. Jeffrey quits but it’s too late, confidence has been lost and post 9/11 the company crumbles revealing the massive fraud and resulting in Jeffrey, Andy and Ken being sentenced to long spells in the big house – 25 years for Jeffrey which as Zarah LOUDLY whispered next to me is the same length of times as murder, which is worrying on multiple levels really. The last scene is at the funeral of Ken, who it is implied killed himself before he could be properly sentenced. Claudia is there, gleeful that the only part of the company found to be worth anything was her division, and we get a slightly clichéd graveside widow–style scene with a poor lowly worker encouraged to sink all her money in Enron shares berating Jeffrey on ruining her life etc. For me this is where the play started to go down hill slightly but as that was about 5 minutes before the end that’s not bad. It was cliché to say the least and the humble headscarf sporting lowly female worker could easily have been left out and replaced with, for example, the security guard who figures earlier in the story, and would have been a hell if a lot less corny. There should have been a less melodramatic way to express the personal hell of thousands of people who lost money in the scandal. The ending provided one last soliloquy for Jeffrey, lamenting his own sense of greed in a greedy world etc – no shit!! Talk about obvious point to make! A far more revealing statement occurred earlier when, asked if he took advantage of the situation with deregulated electricity he scoffs in disdain and asks am I a man? - of course I took advantage of the situation, that’s what business is! I would like to re watch the last 10 minutes or so as I always find it difficult to concentrate right at the end and I feel the speech he made at this point needed more thought, by me and the writer!
The play was staged, I believe, very well using lighting in a fun and imaginative way. I particularly liked the first rising then dramatically falling shareprice displayted on the sur-title screen above the stage, acting like an omnipotent god controlling all that occurs beneath. There was a scene with light sabers which I enjoyed greatly and in general it was, I felt with my limited experience, well staged. There was one quite good speech at the end given by one of the women who valued the company – an analogy of the stock market as an airplane. You don’t know how it works but when you get on you assume it will – kind of my understanding of finance, or was until a few years ago when everything started to crumble about our international ears, but not the kind of thing you want to hear from someone who supposedly knows what they’re doing!! At the end it said that many of the processes employed by Enron are now used in companies around the world, in which case why were they all sent to jail? Anyway, a very enjoyable experience – good luck getting the pricey tickets me and Zaz enjoyed though HAHA.
Right, last week I had the great fortune of being invited by the lovely Zarah to see Enron, a production currently running at The Noel Coward Theatre. These tickets were a gift to the lovely Zarah from her brother and luckily for me the boyfriend had a prior engagement so she invited me instead!! Yay for being the back up plan to boyfriends! Anyway they were basically the best seats I have EVER HAD at the theatre, usually “preferring” the cheapo scabby tickets with restricted view in the gods or whatever. Here we were second row from the front in the grand circle and I had an aisle seat so my knees weren’t in blistering pain from the first 30 minutes onwards!! The man with the largest head on earth sitting in front of me and squirming throughout is not going to get a mention – I hate him too much and his big fat retarded meat head doesn’t deserve any more of my time. What a pretty theatre the Noel Coward is though, can’t remember going there before, although in fairness the view is probably very different 50 foot up at the back. Also the whole experience is just so different in the posho seats – for example I walked straight out and into the nice loos in the foyer rather than having to queue for the entire interval outside the typical 1 cubicle provided for the chavs upstairs. AND, it’s been so long since I have been to the theatre as opposed to the opera or the ballet that I forgot you can take booze in there with you. Bonus!
Enron is the contemporary play/music dance spectacle charting the rise and fall of the energy company Enron, which collapsed at the beginning of the naughties due to massive amounts of fraud. Now, I know lots of appropriate sounding phrases and terms about finance and fraud and stuff but clearly I don’t know the accurate meanings of any of these terms and it would be no doubt rather unwise therefore to start using them now. So, in advance, apologies for my horrendous layman’s language or complete avoidance of any appropriate sounding classifications as I am clearly not going to get the intricacies of this situation. However, the play did do remarkably well at simplifying the facts for the tiny minds of people like me, at points perhaps glossing over things or leaving quite big holes in the audiences understanding, I suppose just because it gets too damn complicated.
The production was a mix of straight drama/comedy with some chorus style singing and dancing, again in a rather comedy fashion, and definitely not as much as I was lead to believe there would be. I would definitely class this as a play above any kind of musical or sound experience or whatever crap the press want to define it as. There was also a certain amount of video footage of things like the Bill Clinton sex scandal, the election of Bush, the fall of the twin towers etc, although at no point would I say this made it a ‘video experience’ as defined again by the press material. I wonder if all the hyped ‘singing dancing extravaganza’ stuff is partly why it apparently received such rubbish reviews in New York as opposed to its reception in London. If I went there expecting a polished musical satire I would have been disappointed. There was very little of the singing/dancing for one thing and the pieces they did do, although I felt successful for what they were, weren’t overly original or, well, polished. This makes it appear as if I didn’t enjoy these segments, which I most definitely did, in fact I probably could have done with more of hem, but I think if you make the choice to do things like that you should fully commit and do it all the way, not just a token dance scene at the beginning and one half way though or what have you. Make it a full on musical spectacular – that doesn’t mean you can’t also have the straight stuff as well. I also think these not un-crude pieces would have seemed even more underwhelming on the Broadway stage, which in my head is always twice as big as anything on at the west end. This production needs a small setting so as not to become dwarfed, it feels pretty intimate and I think it would have appeared jarring on a larger scale.
So, the story; It all begins at an office party where the central character Jeffrey Skilling is introduced as a new recruit for the company Enron, based in Huston, Texas. He is very upset about people not understanding something called mark to market, why I don’t know but hey once again the writer did a damn successful job of explaining it in a coherent and simplified manner for me to be able to understand with my more than shoddy grasp of finance! Thus begins a seemingly short lived power struggle between Jeffrey and Claudia Roe, another high flyer in the company. Claudia wants to continue building power plants and pipes, producing the oil and gas which made the company big. Jeffrey wants to make it an ‘energy’ company, ditching the production and instead building a trade floor. If I understood business, finance or in fact anything at this point I would carry on but I don’t so I won’t. Jeffrey and Claudia are also shagging, although as their rivalry increases that soon stops. There was a particularly odd line near the beginning after they have been doing it on the desk – they talk about the future of the company, about how Ken the president or owner or whatever was soon to step down and appoint a new president. At this point Claudia requests a tissue from Jeffrey as she ‘appears to be leaking/dripping’?!?!?!!??!?? WTF???? I think they were attempting to set the quasi-comedy tone.
Time goes by, Jeffrey becomes the golden child as stock prices soar and Claudia is gradually beaten to the sides, still stuck in the pre Jeffrey company mind set. Jeffrey sees the future and it is greedy. He sees there is money to be made but his company, priced on high hopes and expectations is failing to make the money that is predicted and is slowly sinking into debt (I think). Step in the nerdy deliberately putrid character of Andrew Fastow, soon to be made CFO, who comes up with a genius way of hiding the bad debt through financial loopholes – namely the creation of a fake company made almost entirely of Enron shares, or stock or whatever it’s called, to swallow the debt. As long as the share prices don’t slip, for some reason, then everything will be fine forever!! (yeah right). Locked in his increasingly dank and gloomy basement the character of Andy becomes more and more that of the crazy mad scientist, alone with his freakish Frankenstein style creations which are slowly starting to take control. These fake companies are represented as weird dinosaur type creatures who skulk around creepily with demonic red eyes. As the play continues their presence becomes more and more sinister as Andy continues to feed and pet them, referring to them like his babies, mourning for them as they get increasingly sick, fed too many bad shares.
The hey-days are becoming an increasingly distant memory as paranoia and fear start to creep into Jeffrey’s mind, Ken knows something’s up but doesn’t want to know too much, Claudia is long gone on a train of bitterness and recrimination, the wolves are drawing in and he knows it. A seemingly disastrous foray into the now deregulated electricity market in the state of California leads to rolling black-outs and share prices slowly starting to drop. Jeffrey quits but it’s too late, confidence has been lost and post 9/11 the company crumbles revealing the massive fraud and resulting in Jeffrey, Andy and Ken being sentenced to long spells in the big house – 25 years for Jeffrey which as Zarah LOUDLY whispered next to me is the same length of times as murder, which is worrying on multiple levels really. The last scene is at the funeral of Ken, who it is implied killed himself before he could be properly sentenced. Claudia is there, gleeful that the only part of the company found to be worth anything was her division, and we get a slightly clichéd graveside widow–style scene with a poor lowly worker encouraged to sink all her money in Enron shares berating Jeffrey on ruining her life etc. For me this is where the play started to go down hill slightly but as that was about 5 minutes before the end that’s not bad. It was cliché to say the least and the humble headscarf sporting lowly female worker could easily have been left out and replaced with, for example, the security guard who figures earlier in the story, and would have been a hell if a lot less corny. There should have been a less melodramatic way to express the personal hell of thousands of people who lost money in the scandal. The ending provided one last soliloquy for Jeffrey, lamenting his own sense of greed in a greedy world etc – no shit!! Talk about obvious point to make! A far more revealing statement occurred earlier when, asked if he took advantage of the situation with deregulated electricity he scoffs in disdain and asks am I a man? - of course I took advantage of the situation, that’s what business is! I would like to re watch the last 10 minutes or so as I always find it difficult to concentrate right at the end and I feel the speech he made at this point needed more thought, by me and the writer!
The play was staged, I believe, very well using lighting in a fun and imaginative way. I particularly liked the first rising then dramatically falling shareprice displayted on the sur-title screen above the stage, acting like an omnipotent god controlling all that occurs beneath. There was a scene with light sabers which I enjoyed greatly and in general it was, I felt with my limited experience, well staged. There was one quite good speech at the end given by one of the women who valued the company – an analogy of the stock market as an airplane. You don’t know how it works but when you get on you assume it will – kind of my understanding of finance, or was until a few years ago when everything started to crumble about our international ears, but not the kind of thing you want to hear from someone who supposedly knows what they’re doing!! At the end it said that many of the processes employed by Enron are now used in companies around the world, in which case why were they all sent to jail? Anyway, a very enjoyable experience – good luck getting the pricey tickets me and Zaz enjoyed though HAHA.
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