Enron

Gaiety Theatre ****

Jeffery Skilling's lawyer sets out the small print in the opening prologue to Enron, a high-octane dramatisation of the catastrophic collapse of the multi-billion-dollar company in 2001. His job, he says, is not to be objective, but to "put the facts together and sell it to you as the truth". This is more than a theatrical metaphor: it is what Skilling and his co-conspirators did too; convincing the global economy that the commodity they were trading was real.

Lucy Prebble’s play is meticulously researched but it is also intensely theatrical. Particularly effective is the way in which Enron functions as a sort of parable or morality tale, an example of the twisted logic of an entire world-view: capitalism. Skilling and his sidekick Andy Fastow only got away with their creative accounting because the man they answered to, Ken Lay, did not want to hear the details of their methods, he only wanted the results. Lay’s hubris, meanwhile, is linked to a national global ideology – the American Dream – that celebrates individual wealth above social responsibility. In Prebble’s play, the political will that allowed Enron to thrive and then precipitated its collapse is endemic: there is a sober lesson for Ireland’s current predicament there too.

Blending musical numbers, news footage, and pantomime, the production ensures that the business world is never boring. One of the most stunning scenes creates an elaborate charade from the hand-gestures of traders against a spectacular backdrop of flashing multi-coloured share-prices. And yet it is easy to forget that there is an excellent play underneath Rupert Goold’s excessive production, which makes literal many of Prebble’s subtle parallels between the circus-like world of the stockmarket and the fantastical illusions of the theatre. Ultimately, the barrage of special effects becomes distracting. The result is never less than engaging. However, it denies the tragic thrust that Prebble appears to be striving for in what is essentially a conventional but powerful drama.

Until Saturday