2025: Enron at Mill Theatre

 

 Enron by Lucy Prebble (UK).  Lexi Sekuless Productions at Mill Theatre, Dairy Road, Fyshwick, Canberra July 31 – August 9, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
July 31

CREATIVES & COMPANY

Cast
Jeffrey Skilling: Jay James Moody; Andy Fastow: Oliver Bailey
Jen (gender changed from Ken) Lay and Ensemble: Andrea Close
Claudia Roe and Ensemble: Lexi Sekuless
Ensemble: Rhys Hekimian, Timmy Sekuless, Alana Denham-Preston

Production Team
Direction for this production was completed by the production team and our rehearsal support team. 
Writer: Lucy Prebble
Set Designer: Soham Apte; Costume Designer: Caitlin Hodder
Lighting Designer: Andrew Snell; Sound Designer: Damian Ashcroft
Production Stage Manager: Chips Jin
Assistant Stage Managers: Paige Macdonald and Bea Grant
Contingencies and Rehearsal Support: Rachel Howard, Jen Noveski, Kate Blackhurst, Heidi Silberman, Maxine Beaumont, Goldele Rayment, PJ Williams
Photographer: Daniel Abroguena
Publicity images: Andrea Close, Rhys Hekimian, Steph Roberts

Producer: Lexi Sekuless Productions; Principal Sponsor: Willard Public Affairs
Special thanks to Molonglo,  Mojo Guitars and PJ Williams

L to R: Jay James Moody as Jeffrey Skilling; Andrea Close as Jen Lay
Oliver Bailey as Andy Fastow; Lexi Sekuless as Claudia Roe
The Party Scene in Enron by Lucy Prebble
Mill Theatre, Canberra 2025

Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy) in 1867 that Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction.  

Lexi Sekuless and The Mill team’s brilliant production of Enron by British playwright Lucy Prebble proves the point 150 years later, in this quite extraordinary satire of the “spectacular rise and notorious fall of the American energy giant Enron and its founding partners Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling”, as Sydney’s New Theatre described it in the Australian premiere in 2013.

Company Secretary Jen Lay in charge.  Ideas man Andy Fastow in background.

Andy Fastow explaining phantom investment system.

Claudia Roe working on company owner Jeffrey Skilling (out of shot)

The Mill, in politically diplomatic Canberra, may not see itself quite like the New Theatre which “was set up in 1932 as the Sydney Workers Art Club, opening with the slogan ‘Art is a Weapon’”, but when you’ve seen this Enron, which you must because it has such a clever design and terrific acting, you should look up Steve Evans’ amazing article in the Canberra Times today as I write (Thursday July 31, 2025 Page 4) headlined Star-spangled soiree where diplomacy’s done to a ‘T’, about the “unmentionable spectre [Mr T] at the magnificent party thrown at the American embassy…[where the] fireworks and herds of brisket and pork-belly barbecue were in celebration of American independence from the British”.

You’ll see a party rather like this - minus the barbecue - on the Mill Theatre stage – with every nuance of underhand meaning similar to Evans’ reporting: “But mentioning the T word [to Meta’s representative] felt a bit like passing wind in church – just not done”.  My point is that though this play was written by a British woman playwright in 2009, it foreshadows America’s progress to today’s President T.  The satire is telling – exciting to watch, especially in close-up in the tiny Mill Theatre; but the truth it reveals is frightening as much as it is illuminating.

It’s important, too, that we have a theatre company in Canberra presenting us, including our national public servants and politicians, with the confronting conclusion – that by not regulating the financial market, especially the use of phantom investment companies, we are all guilty of setting up exactly what Karl Marx predicted.

Yet, as Jeffrey Skilling believed even after years in jail, performed with real sincerity by Jay James Moody, he had never intended to cause economic breakdown: he was merely trying to “change the world” for the better.  Though dangerous climate warming is not mentioned in this play, it has been technical innovation and developments in financial markets – over the past few thousand years – aimed at expanding economic activity and improving people’s incomes,  and the inevitable profiteering, which is now threatening us with worse even than Karl Marx imagined.  Some say not just economic chaos and warfare, but the self-destruction of our species.

 Ironically in the play, Andy Fastow makes a big point of the 'Darwinian evolution' of modern business.  

Lexi Sekuless, in presenting this play and so artfully performing it (herself included) in a wonderful tightly directed small team (New Theatre used 15 actors), must be recognised for both the quality and the importance of her work.

Please don’t miss Enron at the Mill Theatre.

 P.S. The fictional character in Prebble’s play, Claudia Roe, appears to have been based on the true woman involved in Enron’s history: Rebecca Mark.  
See https://commongroundolivia.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-real-claudia-roe.html 

©Frank McKone, Canberra