The least appealing play in the CFT summer season might just have turned out to be the best.
Something rather remarkable has gone on here.
A tale of financial scandal which sounded as dull as ditchwater has been transformed into a scintillating and provocative piece of theatre, high on style, superbly staged and quite fascinating througho
ut.
Wit combines with endless invention and outrageous imagination to produce an audaciously-brilliant night which crashes through the conventions to offer a fast-moving visual feast which will linger long in the memory.
Lucy Prebble's play throws down the challenge, and director Rupert Goold responds thrillingly, lobbing tragedy and comedy together, chucking in the best use of projections I've ever seen and mixing it all together with song and dance.
The result is a striking piece of theatre which grips from first to last, dazzles at every turn and sends soaring the high drama hidden at the heart of the Enron scandal.
The details are probably beyond human understanding, but the gist seems to be that the top execs at Enron disguised massive debt, realising unmade profits in a succession of virtual companies on the basis that there's no need to wait for the grapes to be grown.
Except that the grapes turn out to be yet more grapes of wrath, bankrupting thousands of savers in a multi-billion dollar fraud – consented to by blindfolded lawyers and accountants-cum-ventriloquists.
Red-eyed raptors are the monsters they unleash, and they prowl the stage, like furies – a superb way to convey the scandal which unfurls against the election of George Bush and the horrors of 9/11, all enacted on stage through projections and the sheer power of the company to conjure – through movement, mask or music – just about anything they wish.
It is quite terrifically done. We even get – briefly but brilliantly – a glimpse of Mr Schwarzenegger as the fraud comes tumbling down.
Samuel West gives a bravura performance as Jeffrey Skilling, the man so driven by greed that he simply can't see outside the bubble he has created; Tom Goodman-Hill delivers spot-on comic timing as Fastow; and Tim Pigott-Smith is utterly convincing as the chairman who ultimately escapes justice.
Whoever thought fraud and big business could be quite so entertaining! Until August 29.
Phil HewittWhat do you think? Click here to send a letter to news@chiobserver.co.uk or leave a comment below.
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