Lucy Prebble

World Premiere run: Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London, UK, 16 October - 15 November 2003
Length: Full Length Play. 2 Acts. Approximate time: about 2 hours 15 minutes, including interval; 74 pages

Dani is 17 and as many young people at the beginning of the century, she is looking for friendship (and more) in chatrooms online. And there she meets two men: 22-years old Lewis and the slightly older Tim. She decides to meet both of them and things start getting complicated - Lewis cannot show more believe that she is really a girl (and they end up having sex more than ones) while Tim is shocked to discover that she is a girl and 17 at that - he believed that he had been chatting with an 11 years old boy.

Once the shock is over, Dani remains friends with both of them - mainly just having sex with Lewis (while he seems to think it is more serious) while developing a real friendship with Tim. And that second relationship is what drives the play - because Dani opens up about her own problems to this damaged man who is trying to be good. And while she is trying to fix both her companions (sex for one of them, a friendly ear for the other) and openly discuss them with the other one, her own family collapsed around her - or ends her collapse anyway. The 4th character in Dani's circle is her mother Jan who finally realizes that her husband has an affair - or better to say that she finally allows herself to admit it.

And that's where the first act closes. It seems pretty obvious who is supposed to be the bad guy. Except that life is never that easy - and when Dani finally needs help, she gets it from the villain Tim. And Lewis manages to slide into the role of the villain by what amounts to stalking. Until the very end when Dani decides to help Tim and discovers that nothing is what it looks like.

It is a disturbing play - it is designed to be. Good and evil are not absolutes and everyone can have redeeming qualities - even when they still remain human garbage. The fact that by the end of the play both of the men look equally villainous is unexpected but not very surprising. And somewhere in that crazy circle, a mother and a daughter maybe finally find a way to communicate.

This was the first play Prebble wrote and it managed to win quite a lot of awards during its first run: The Critics' Circle Award (2004), George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright (2004) and TMA Award for Best New Play (2004) and lost the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize to Sarah Ruhl. And the play deserves its accolades - it is nuanced and funny and even 17 years later, still relevant (except for the chatrooms of course).

PS: The title comes from a WWII practice as explained by Jan: during the London raids, people were issued ratio tokens and they could either collect a lot of them and buy meat or use a token at a time to buy sugar and sweets. As noone knew if they will be alive after the next raid, people went for the instant gratification. All of the subplots in the play are all about instant gratification - so the title fits perfectly. show less

Completely and utterly bonkers.

The entire ENRON case - where the company committed one of the largest cases of financial fraud in history by misrepresenting earnings to improve their performance, modifying balance sheets and a little light laundering - is so bombastic, so ridiculous that it's hard to believe it really happened. It was one of the most successful smoke and mirror shows in business history so it makes sense that Lucy Prebble's play would be built upon the thrill of the show more illusion, creating a spectacle so large and impossible to hate that it gave the world rose tinted glasses. Prebble fills her play with dance, surreal images and metaphors, bright lights and circus style shenanigans in order to replicate a more literal representation of the carnival ENRON created. How many pieces of drama about business fraud do you know have Jurassic Park references, android accountants, 3 blind mice, messiah imagery and raptors? This also serves to make something as dry and often confusing as financing rather interesting. No mean feat!

It's over the top and often as subtle as a brick but then again it's supposed to be. It's a children's fable, a cautionary tale designed to shock and awe. Prebble's interpretation of Jeffrey Skilling is one of almost Shakespearean proportions - he's a dreamer, one consumed with the thrill of the chase who doesn't mind making himself unpopular in order to reach for the stars, no matter how impossible his dreams may seem. Your mileage will vary on your opinion of him by the play's end (which is a little hampered by being so rushed and a tad convoluted) since, even with such a tragic hero depiction, it's hard to sympathise with a man who ruined so many lives then tried to convince everyone he had no idea what was going on in his company (this reminded me a lot of recent events with the News of the World and Rebekah Brooks & Rupert Murdoch trying to convince everyone they had no idea their team were hacking into the voicemails of a murdered schoolgirl.) I also thought the elements with Skilling's distant relationship with his daughter were too cliched a manner to humanise him.

It's probably not a play that's supposed to be read since it relies so heavily on putting on a bombastic show to dazzle the audience (I'm still kicking myself for missing the play when it came to Edinburgh last year) but even without the visuals, there's a very entertaining tragi-comedy in these pages. It's definitely not for everyone (as witnessed by how badly the play bombed on Broadway, closing after less than a month, even with the lovely Norbert Leo Butz in the leading role) but for those with an open mind and a willingness to go with the flow, ENRON is unlike anything in modern theatre. Lucy Prebble is one to watch, if you ignore that terrible Secret Diary of a Call Girl show she writes.

Here's some YouTube stuff of the play.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1pP90sy574 show less

A black comedy about the meltdown of the company that defined bold marketing strategies still taught in business schools around the nation. The excesses of the company are laid out in rather muted form, not going into details that get beyond the level of a basic audience to comprehend. The character of Skilling is the key to this play; he developed the system that created the problem, and was unable to recognize the inability of his system to continue to make money without delivering the show more goods. Strange touches, such as living raptors and a board wearing three blind mice masks, create a somewhat surreal sense that is yet not more surreal than the very real business dealings being undertaken. Well written, well researched, and a much bigger hit in England than America, for reasons that are not explicable to me. show less

3.75