Playwright Lucy Prebble, about to turn 30, says she didn't want to write a conventional docudrama about how tangled finances, superegos, and greed brought down an American energy giant. "I collaborated with Rupert [Goold, an associate director at the Royal Shakespeare as well as Headlong's A.D.] to shape a hyper-theatrical event."
The idea was not to proceed gently down the garden path. Goold took off running, with songs, dance, multimedia, surreal images and stylized action (for instance, homages to "Jurassic Park" and countless dinosaur flicks and "Star Wars") and wrapped them around the dark, dank, often menancing subterranean world of Enron's downfall.
Prebble, now famous as the adaptor of "Secret Diary of a Call Girl" from a London escort's book of blog postings, grew up in Surrey. Her brother and sister are management consultants, her father works for a software company, and her mother is a state school teacher.
So where did her spin on Enron come from? "The workplace, where most of us spend most of their lives, is quite under-represented in theater," she says, "so it was a road-not-taken. I often think what would have happened if I'd entered that world since I've always found it hard to reconcile the idea of social responsibility with corporate, libertarian perspectives."
She surrounded herself with endless research about Enron and energy companies and contacted many of the people involved, "but not the principal players because some are in prison and one [Kenneth Lay] is dead. I decided there's no point in writing a drama where you condemn everybody and say, 'Isn't making money bad.' The delusion that goes on in all of us is what makes it fascinating."
The one rule she kept in mind was Do No Bore. "Financial trading floors are actually the most theatrical places. Though Enron is about numbers and economics, I thought, 'Let's do it with lots of swearing, hyper-masculinity, motorbikes and lightsabers."
