American corporation Enron’s involvement with the investment bankers Lehman Brothers and its subsequent collapse in 2002 is the subject of a ripping satire by British playwright Lucy Prebble, and it’s coming to the Mill Theatre. 

Described by Mill director Lexi Sekuless, as “an exhilarating business thriller”, the show features the talents of Jay James-Moody, Oliver Bailey, Andrea Close, Lexi Sekuless, Rhys Hekimian, Timmy Sekuless, and Alana Denham-Preston.

Unusually for these litigious times, the play features real life people, notably Jeffrey Skilling, the Harvard-educated president and later CEO of Enron, who did a deal and only served 12 of his 24-year sentence. 

There are also Ken Lay, the founder and CEO of Enron, here played as Jen Lay by Andrea Close, chief financial officer Andrew Stuart Fastow, played by Oliver Bailey and Claudia Roe, a fictional composite of several real-life women at Enron, played by Lexi Sekuless. 

Prebble, a member of the Royal Court Writers’ Program who went on to be one of the lead writers on HBO’s Succession, starts out with a deceptively realistic look at the Enron story, but quickly injects elements of Shakespearean tragedy and quirkier elements into it, so that the Skilling character has been called a “a modern-day Macbeth”.

You can also expect to see the creepy Raptor played by Denham-Preston – think the velociraptor from Jurassic Park.

I caught up with James-Moody, who is spending half a week in Sydney and half a week in Canberra as he rehearses the plum part of Skilling.

He’s famous in Sydney for being a co-founder of Sydney’s Hayes Theatre Co, and co-author of The Dismissal, an Extremely Serious Musical Comedy that has won the David Williamson Prize for Excellence in Writing for Australian Theatre and the AWGIE for best Musical Theatre at the Australian Writers’ Guild’s annual awards.

He describes his career as “accidental”, going back to an early accidental experience performing the lead role in Rent. He decided he’d like to be in charge next time, so formed his own theatre company, Squabbalogic, which ran from 2006 to 2023. 

“I was just having a go, and there was no huge inspiration,” he says.

He’s produced, directed and acted for countless shows, in recent years spending a whole year onstage in The Book of Mormon musical.

It was while working on Twelfth Night for Damien Ryan’s company Sport for Jove in Sydney that he met Sekuless, who was playing Malvolia.

They kept in touch and when she invited him to Canberra to have a look at the play BLANK by Nassim Soleimanpour, he asked: “Can’t I be in it?” She made that happen.

At first he was daunted when Sekuless asked him to play Skilling, who carries the show.

“I was a bit reluctant… he talks so much in the play and I love little supporting roles,” he tells me, like the Friar in Romeo and Juliet. But he watched the 2005 American documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room for background, and he succumbed.

With Gordon Gekko from the 1987 film Wall Street somehow lurking in the background living out the motto “greed is good”, James-Moody believes there are very few innocent characters in the play, saying: “Almost everyone is complicit until the final pages of the show.”

“It’s a very pacy show and we barrel through it. It tells a true story, but it embraces a lot of abstract theatricality and absurdism.

“Lucy [Prebble] has been very clever in finding entertaining things so that money and finance stuff is quite clear. It’s a perfect example of taking something quite dry and making it theatrical,” he says. 

Enron: The Corporate Collapse That Shook the World, Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, July 23 August 9.