(Fintan O'Toole’s article appeared in the Irish Times, 10/16.)
CULTURE SHOCK: IF IT WERE possible to formulate the play that Ireland most needs to see right now, it would be a genetically engineered offspring of two of the big shows in the second week of Dublin Theatre Festival: Lucy Prebble’s Enron , at the Gaiety, and Henrik Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman, at the Abbey.
Each play has obvious points of contact with the world of Seanie and Fingers and with the mess they’ve made of the country. Enron recounts the rise and fall (in 2001) of a company whose fantasy economics foreshadowed the larger crash in global-finance capitalism. John Gabriel Borkman unfolds in the aftermath of a banking scandal, its title character still holding on to the delusions of omnipotence that made him believe he could do what he wanted with other people’s money.
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