I wonder if Lucy Prebble's Enron, a play about greed and excess, might be best served by a production that's stripped down and austere.
Director Rupert Goold certainly didn't think so. Songs, video projection, dance routines, special effects, the inevitable slow-motion miming bits (including a man jumping from on of the Twin Towers).
I guess I have quite ascetic tastes (more so than the critics, who loved it) but I found all the showbiz got in the way of a good, mainly documentary, play about what used to be America's biggest ever bankruptcy. I'm not sure how much if it was new - the idea about how long it would take to count to a million and then a billion, for example, comes from John Allen Paulos's book “Innumeracy” - see a reference in this article by John Lanchester) and presumably a lot of the rest is indebted to The Smartest Guys In The Room (which the play has led me to order.) But it was well explained, witty and fairly even-handed. Great performances, too - especially from Samuel West.
I preferred the much smaller-scale Stockwell, however (full disclosure: I know Kieron Barry, who edited the transcripts from the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and have worked with him in the past).
I've not seen any of the previous transcript plays and was, for some reason, a little sceptical. But this made for compelling theatre and a powerful indictment of the Met Police's incompetence and arrogance. And the clarity of the production worked perfectly with the text.
Director Rupert Goold certainly didn't think so. Songs, video projection, dance routines, special effects, the inevitable slow-motion miming bits (including a man jumping from on of the Twin Towers).
I guess I have quite ascetic tastes (more so than the critics, who loved it) but I found all the showbiz got in the way of a good, mainly documentary, play about what used to be America's biggest ever bankruptcy. I'm not sure how much if it was new - the idea about how long it would take to count to a million and then a billion, for example, comes from John Allen Paulos's book “Innumeracy” - see a reference in this article by John Lanchester) and presumably a lot of the rest is indebted to The Smartest Guys In The Room (which the play has led me to order.) But it was well explained, witty and fairly even-handed. Great performances, too - especially from Samuel West.
I preferred the much smaller-scale Stockwell, however (full disclosure: I know Kieron Barry, who edited the transcripts from the inquest into the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, and have worked with him in the past).
I've not seen any of the previous transcript plays and was, for some reason, a little sceptical. But this made for compelling theatre and a powerful indictment of the Met Police's incompetence and arrogance. And the clarity of the production worked perfectly with the text.
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