ABSTRACT
Lucy Prebble’s 2009 play Enron begins with a party celebrating Enron’s now infamous “mark-to-market” accounting model and remains tightly focused on the company’s fi nances throughout. Some of the play’s most startling moments come as it literalizes the rich fi gurative registers that facilitated the transformation of Enron from a utilities corporation-“gas and oil: people think . . . trapped wind and Arabs”—into a speculative trading outfi t (Prebble 7). Under Rupert Goolds’ direction the market index becomes an ascending and descending choir of human bodies, the company’s burgeoning debt is a red-eyed dinosaur roaming the stage, and electricity traders fi ght with swinging light sabers. Most momentously of all, the ash of the collapsing World Trade Center towers turns into the shredded accounts of the teetering company as the “belief” that kept the share price fl ying fi nally falters: “it’d be fi ne. If everybody believed. If nobody got scared. As long as people didn’t ask stupid questions. About what it is keeps planes in the air” (98). The confl ation of the two events allows Prebble to signal once more the failure in American idealism that the play reads as both cause and symptom of the Enron story. Such an apocalyptic depiction of the dangers of fi nancial risk captured the mood of both its staging in 2009-10 (as Britain reeled under the debts incurred by the salvaging of its wrecked and bloated banks) and its setting in late 2001 (as the condemnation following the collapse of Enron led its leaders to be dubbed “fi nancial terrorists” by an already-shocked America).
