by Harrison Whitaker
Early in act one of James Graham’s drama Ink, the play’s protagonist Larry Lamb is offered a choice. He stands in the offices of The Sun at the moment of its purchase by Rupert Murdoch, and in the moment before Lamb makes official his editorship of Murdoch’s new tabloid venture, he is offered the position of his choice by the chairman of the Daily Mirror, Hugh Cudlipp. Lamb, until this moment tepidly willing to help execute Murdoch’s vision, has his occupational crossroad expressed physically: “Lamb wavers momentarily, looking next door where Murdoch is…” (21). This moment of dualistic indecision encapsulates many of the play’s key themes: innovation versus stagnation, tradition versus modernity, and establishment versus anti-establishment. The thematic structure of this scene, however, underpins the primary dramaturgical model which guides the direction of the play as a whole: the model of the morality play.
Contemporary pieces of drama like Graham’s Ink and Lucy Prebble’s ENRON assume the foundational vestiges of the medieval morality play in order to form a humanist critique not of temptation or sin, but of capitalist excess. Both plays synthesize moral theses by demonstrating the pitfalls of greed and Marlovian overreach through techniques found in antiquated morality plays as well as techniques devised specifically for the morality play’s contemporary form. Though both Ink and ENRON comprise stories rooted in real-life happenings, both plays also embellish and manipulate the events upon which they are based in order to cement their moral messages into the dramatic action itself.
I. Dramatic and Stylistic Precedent for the Contemporary Morality Play
According to Pamela King, morality plays are best characterized by their tendency to “offer their audiences moral instruction through dramatic action that is broadly allegorical … The action concerns the alienation from God and return to God, presented as the temptation, fall and restitution of the protagonist” (235). Though the two above-mentioned plays shed the medieval morality play’s Christian paradigm, they importantly retain the key elements of temptation and fall presented as a spectacle of morally tragic excess. What is perhaps most crucial to the moralistic construction of these plays, however, is the way in which they retain the traits of the morality play protagonist. Important elements of the morality play’s protagonist are his “ordariness and universality,” his being “surrounded by a group of characters who were allegorical embodiments of moral qualities,” and his undergoing a “recognition” or anagoresis, a critical moment of self-realization also key to the tragic protagonist (Rozett 75). The dramaturgical construction of Ink and ENRON centers around a protagonist whose humanity is (initially) emphasized, whose tempters are as powerful as they are mystical, and whose downfall is predicated by an ill-advised attempt at monetary excess. By taking many elements from medieval morality plays and inserting them into modern financial stories, Graham and Prebble forge a criticism of capital excess not by demonstrating the practically negative effects of destitution but by showing the moral withering and corruption of those at the peak of a moneymaking system.
The aforementioned tableau in Ink is a moment key to the dramatic construction of both “modern morality plays:” the moment of choice. After a Mephistophelean-like introduction wherein Murdoch shows Larry Lamb in quick succession the indifference of his colleagues towards him as well as the compensation and power he would have as the new editor of The Sun, Lamb is tasked with choosing between the visions of grandeur and power he’s just been presented and a safer, more conservative position with his former employer. A similar moment can be found early in ENRON as well, though in this moment the choice is thrust upon the play’s “protagonist,” Jeffery Skilling. In scene three of act one, Enron Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Lay is forced to choose between Skilling and Claudia Roe for the position of Enron’s new president. Before Skilling even first appears in ENRON, he has developed a new business practice called “Mark-to-Market,” a program described briefly by Skilling as “a way for us to realize the profits were gonna make now” (13). Essentially, Skilling has begun his capitalistic moral descent before the play even begins; Mark-to-Market is ground zero for the additional fraud that will inevitably result in Skilling’s downfall. In the early part of the play, however, Prebble makes the dichotomy between Roe and Skilling clear; whereas Skilling remains blind to the dangers posed to him and his company by this new program, Roe is acutely aware of its dangers: in scene two of act one, Roe sarcastically asks a defensive Skilling, “we get to decide the profits. Why would that be anything but a good thing?” (12). At the time of the composition of many medieval morality plays, the predominant Christian doctrine contained “currents of thought which held that man had absolute free will to choose in this world between vice and virtue and that those choices affected his fate in the next” (King 236). By staging a moment of choice and implying it to be an indispensably critical moment in the moral degeneration of its main character, the modern morality play effectively appropriates medieval Christian doctrine and transmutes it into stage action. Medieval morality plays created dramatic action by demonstrating an individual’s free response to moral dilemmas based on liturgical precedent; Graham and Prebble eschew the scriptural basis while maintaining the emphasis on the protagonist’s ability to respond freely. In this sense, both medieval and contemporary morality plays place a strong and clear emphasis on the elective nature of morality itself. As with the protagonists of medieval morality plays, the center of the “modern morality play” experiences a descent predicated on an early choice to escape, an opportunity that inevitably goes ignored.
As key to the moralistic slipping of the morality play’s protagonist is his “process of experience and correction that [leads] to his redemption” (Rozett 75). Nearly all medieval morality plays (Everyman excluded) offer the opportunity for heavenly redemption to be gained through earthly repentance, but both Ink and ENRON instead emphasize the ephemerality and mortality of some of its characters in order to show the irredeemable and specifically inescapable nature of their actions (King 255). In ENRON’s final scene, Skilling (also having just attended the funeral of Kenneth Lay in the previous scene) undergoes a process of literally inescapable incarceration, coupled with a psychological one as well: “(Skilling points to spikes and dips in the graph) All humanity is here. There’s greed, there’s fear, joy, faith … hope … and the greatest of these … is money. (The sound of prison doors slamming)” (79). Not only has Skilling become physically entrapped for his wrongdoings, he has additionally failed to sequester himself from the financial entity he created. The dénouement in Ink is similar but achieves the same effect through an emphasis on mortality. Murdoch, whose status as Lamb’s key tempter has granted him the dramatic ability to appear and disappear at key moments throughout the play, ends the play with his character cemented as almost supernaturally above the consequences of his paper’s actions; one of Lamb’s final lines to Murdoch is “Why do I feel like you probably will just somehow outlive us all?” to which Murdoch responds with silence (130). The nature of redemption itself in the cases of Ink and ENRON is decidedly ambiguous; though both Lamb and Skilling are certainly not spared suffering for their monetarily-driven wrongdoings, neither ever specifically denies an opportunity of redemption either. By failing to offer an obviously demonstrated path to redemption, the two plays highlight the personal responsibility of their protagonists’ moral failures. Divine interventions are notably and expectedly absent from ENRON and Ink which increase the focus of both plays on worldly actions and therefore limits focus on otherworldly redemption. In eliminating the prospect of heavenly assumption as a dramatic conceit, the modern morality play limits its possibilities of “redemption” to the purely physical, and in this sense both ENRON and Ink show paths to redemption for their protagonists: physical redemption for Lamb being an unceremonious offstage death after the play’s end and for Skilling an implied prison sentence. Though the protagonist’s ability to self-reform is excised from any possibility of heavenly redemption in the modern morality play, the antecedent to redemption, temptation, retains its strength thematically within both plays. In particular the character of Rupert Murdoch demonstrates a key vein in which the modern retains a generic medieval convention: the mystical tempter.
According to King, the primary dramatic moment of a medieval morality play was the protagonist’s encounter with temptation: “An encounter with a differentiated sin was the matter of protracted struggle, demanding constant personal vigilance … This struggle is the matter of the plot of an individual morality play, the whole dynamic of its action” (236). The tempters in morality plays are, also according to King, more aptly called “forces” rather than people or any other descriptor due to the often-mystic power they possess (239). In Ink, Murdoch’s tempter status is cemented by way of pre-existing dramatic techniques like scene changes; the prologue of the play features multiple venue shifts from restaurant to restaurant, present to past and back again all precipitated by Murdoch’s own lines. By aligning the dramatic presence of a scene with Murdoch’s own verbal implication, Graham assigns a menacingly mystical power to Murdoch and the allure of what he offers Lamb. In ENRON, however, the mystical nature of temptation extends beyond the human body entirely. When Andy Fastow is first describing his scheme to sell ENRON’s debt to subsidiary shell companies, he pulls a “tiny red glowing box” from his desk that “glows red and throbs” as the two formulate their plan (38-39). The money of ENRON becomes embodied in a mystically glowing “red dot,” a talisman of sorts that appears to take on a life of its own. The effect of temptation in ENRON also grows as the moral slippage does; Fastow’s “lair,” now the financial heart of ENRON’s auto-debt relief scheme, becomes a “huge construct that has been designed to literally and metaphorically ‘support’ the level above it” (42). The physical manifestation of temptation takes full shape, however, at the end of ENRON’s first act when three raptors “take corporeal form” as Fastow calls them his “clever girls” immediately before the act one-ending blackout (44). Whereas Graham’s usage of the “mystic tempter” takes form through a stylish, Mephistophelean Murdoch, Prebble instead chooses to manifest those temptations as mystical objects before showing the development of their grotesque nature as the entity they represent becomes more grotesque itself.
Though Lamb and Skilling are in many ways similar protagonists, Prebble uses very different techniques to emphasize the humanity of her protagonist. Skilling, like Lamb, is already immensely successful when he first appears onstage but, unlike Lamb, is rapidly ascending to the forefront of ENRON instead of wading stagnantly at the bottom of the upper crust. In fact, the opening scenes of ENRON effectively de-humanize Skilling by painting him as boisterous in the face of his ill-conceived Mark-to-Market scheme and by placing him in opposition to the level-headed Claudia Roe. Skilling’s crucial moment of humanization doesn’t arrive until act one, scene six, epigraphically described a “A memory:”
DAUGHTER. Again!
SKILLING. What d’you mean, again? Okay, one two three four … how long would it take for Daddy to count out a billion dollars!
DAUGHTER. No!
SKILLING. Yeah, there’s such a thing, a billion dollars! One, two, three, four – I’m gonna do it now –
DAUGHTER. No!
SKILLING. Okay. I’ll work it out instead. (He calculates in his head.) Counting a billion dollars would take me … thirty-two years?! (He scowls, checks.) Yeah, around thirty-two years. (His daughter fades into the dark.)
DAUGHER. (Voiceover.) One, two, three, four, five, six, seven… (The counting continues into:)
SKILLING: Okay, people! Come on! Time is money! (29)
As in Ink, the humanization of this scene also serves as a chronicle of descent. Skilling is the sole character of ENRON ever seen outside of his workplace, and this fragment of the play shows the chilling intermingling of the two, culminating in Skilling’s daughter “fad[ing] into the dark.” Though Skilling is initially shown attentively and tenderly with his daughter, the progression of the scene mirrors Skilling’s inability to self-remove from ENRON for any extended period of time and accurately reflecting his previous declaration that he is ENRON. Both Ink and ENRON possess carefully constructed moments that not only accomplish the important task of humanizing their protagonists but also concurrently showing their loss of humanistic qualities.
II. Dramatic and Stylistic Innovations in the Modern Morality Play
Structurally, Ink and ENRON retain strong connections to their medieval predecessors in how they dissect the moral dissolution of an individual in the face of temptation, fiscal or otherwise. Both plays, however, make notable additions to the formula in question for various purposes. Primarily, Graham and Prebble construct dramatic conceits which function as moral barometers of sorts, allowing audience members and readers to track the decline of the protagonist against a comparatively stable metric. Interestingly, both Prebble and Graham use an unusual and specific measure for this purpose: their respective plays’ female characters.
In Michael Billington’s 2009 Guardian article “Making a Drama Out of the Economic Crisis,” Prebble is quoted regarding her decision to create the composite character of Claudia Roe for ENRON:
Women play a key role in the Enron story … Sherron Watkins was the chief whistleblower in the company. Bethany McLean was the young woman who wrote a piece in Fortune magazine that helped burst the Enron bubble. I’m not arguing that women have a stronger moral awareness than men, but, from speaking to women in business, I’ve learned they have a different perspective. Because they are more connected to family life, they tend to see things from the outside and are ready to declare that the emperor has no clothes.
Prebble’s declaration of the moral competence and constancy of women compared to their male counterparts frames an understanding of Claudia Roe as moral frame for the action of ENRON. Prebble’s aforementioned employment of Roe as a base against which to measure the moral decline of Skilling is present from one of the play’s earliest moments in scene three, in which Ken Lay chooses Skilling as president of the company over Roe. Lay gives no immediate reasoning for this decision, simply telling Roe that “You know, you were always my favorite. But I’m offering Jeff the job;” a statement whose unacknowledged arbitrariness glares in a play which otherwise assigns comprehensible motivation to nearly all of its other actions (18). Rather its impetus be sexism or simple poor judgement, Lay’s decision to elevate Skilling over Roe functions perfectly as a dramaturgical measure which positions Roe and Skilling appropriately for the action to come. Roe’s presence in the play from that moment foreword is clearly sidelined in favor of Skilling’s; her increasingly spare time onstage is primarily either reserved for complaining to Lay about the new demeanor and direction of Enron or for voicing suspicion towards Skilling and Fastow’s new trading models. Roe’s status as a marker for Skilling’s moral decline is perhaps most evident in the play’s final scenes in which Skilling, having fully descended into the throes of shady capital manipulation, contrasts most starkly with Roe. As the two of them prepare to attend Lay’s funeral, Skilling tells Roe that “I told my daughter I was innocent. I believe I’m innocent,” before Roe summarily responds that “Neither of those things make you innocent” (77). She then goes on to remind Skilling that the only component of Enron that remained profitable throughout all of its financial turmoil was the power plant whose construction she had repeatedly championed throughout the company’s fixation on Mark-to-Market and other financial schemes. Just as important to this scene, however, is the introduction of a previously unmet female character: Irene Gant. Gant, seemingly another creation of Prebble’s, was a former employee of Enron who “lost a hundred a fifty thousand dollars” due to the poor advice and misdealing of Skilling and other Enron higher-ups (77). She accosts Skilling for his impact on her life, a fact to which he ultimately has no unmet rebuttal. In this scene, the play’s last before the epilogue, Skilling is essentially forced to come face-to-face with the results of his crime for the first time. Given Prebble’s comments regarding the heightened perception to moral issues and the misuse of power, it ultimately seems natural that the two harbingers of Skilling’s realization appear in the female form.
The function of a woman as a metric by which moral decline can be measured is as key to the moral construction of Ink as it is to ENRON. In Ink’s introductory notes, Graham lists the 32 characters that make up the ensemble of the play, only four of which are intended to be played by non-ensemble actors: Larry Lamb, Rupert Murdoch, Hugh Cudlipp, and Stephanie Rahn (4). Rahn is notable among this group not only for her gender but also because she has comparatively paltry amount of stage time and dialogue when opposed to the other three men of the non-ensemble group. Rahn does not even appear onstage until a short scene midway through the first act in which she agrees to change her last name from “Kahn” to “Rahn” and begin passing as white in order to secure modeling work at The Sun in the future (46-49). Here one already begins to witness harmful effects of The Sun’s focus on torpedoing their readership numbers: Kahn (now Rahn) is told by the staff of The Sun, after being subjected to an insulting comparison to Shere Khan from The Jungle Book, that her success will only be hindered by her ethnicity and, by extension, her own personal identity. Rahn appears again onstage only a small handful of times before she becomes the center of the play’s dramatic climax in which Lamb asks her to appear fully nude in The Sun in one final push for an increase in readership. After she does so and the paper is published, Rahn returns to Lamb’s office in order to explain the effects that this choice has had on her: “my school … they said I shouldn’t bother … It’s only when you turn it. And see it. And see everyone else seeing it. On the street, the bus. See them toss you away on to the floor” (125). In this moment, Lamb is forced to greet the negative effects of his quest for increased readership firsthand and confront the now-ruined reputation of a young woman which he pushed into decline. Unlike Claudia Roe in ENRON, Stephanie Rahn’s evolving position in Ink is at least partially reflective of the audience’s status in the play as well. Rahn is first introduced in Ink in a state of relative “innocence;” she has not yet shed her own identity, she is unaware of the lengths to which Lamb and Murdoch are willing to go in order to secure the success of their paper, and she has yet to submit to doing anything with which she is not comfortable. Both Ink and ENRON use their central female characters as stand-ins for moral constancy; they consequently become objects of uprightness who then suffer unjustly due to the financially-driven quest of their respective plays’ main characters.
Both Rahn and Roe balance the roles of agent and victim throughout their respective plays, demonstrating how perverse male power and ambition can stifle the otherwise upright intentions of women within reach. Ink’s character of Muriel McKay, however, fails to straddle this divide. Muriel, wife of Rupert Murdoch’s chief advisor Sir Alick McKay, appears onstage only briefly before becoming the offstage center of action in the play’s second act. In short, Muriel McKay is kidnapped and murdered by two young criminals who had previously seen Murdoch on television and wished to make a name for themselves by harming his organization. Lamb’s decision as to whether or not to cover Muriel’s kidnapping in The Sun is framed as a moment of major consequence in the play; he interrupts Murdoch in one moment to deliver the following point regarding the paper’s coverage of Muriel’s disappearance:
Murdoch That isn’t fair, and Larry, don’t talk to me / like –
Lamb Would you like me to read the mission statement we published on our first day, echoing your own words? ‘Light into every corner, no matter how … into Normal People’s lives, if that’s what people want to read’? I’m sorry I must have missed the caveat that said ‘everyone except when it concerns the Sun itself’!
Silence. Lamb puts the phone down. (107)
Though this exchange (and the kidnapping ordeal writ large) could be seen as a final, fatal misstep for Lamb and his paper, the crucial nature of this scene is its ultimate lack of consequence. Muriel is ultimately presumed to have been murdered, and the paper moves forward without a hiccup in its chase for more readers:
Lamb That (At the gap [in readership between The Sun and The Mirror) What – is – that, what would fill that for fuck’s –
Brian In twenty-four hours, nothing. If a kidnap and murder story didn’t get us there, the scoop of the fucking year, then nothing.
Lamb (snapping) Well then, they must want something else! Right? Or the gap wouldn’t be there, would it?! (116)
The above exchange ultimately leads to Lamb’s decision to feature a fully nude model in the next day’s edition of The Sun. Lamb expresses first expresses this desire by asking Sun employee Joyce Hopkirk to find him a model:
Lamb A girl, a normal girl. But could be a bit more than normal.
Joyce I take, I do take my responsibility towards them [The Sun’s models] / incredibly seriously –
Lamb Look, it’s up to her, her choice, isn’t that what we’re all about?
Joyce I don’t know, honestly, I think I may have lost track of / what we’re –
Lamb Just pick one and send her to me, now. (116-117)
This moment best encapsulates the way in which Lamb’s unmitigated quest for the fiscal and cultural success of The Sun is directed in the play against morally uninvested bystanders. Lamb was, in fact, never specifically interested in Stephanie Rahn as the woman who would first appear nude in his paper; he simply desired any “normal girl” to perform the task at hand. In this whole streak of the play, Lamb moves from the kidnapping and murder of Muriel McKay to the sidelining of Joyce Hopkirk to the physical and social degradation of Stephanie Rahn with such swiftness and ease that the entire dénouement of Ink seems characterized by the mistreatment of women in the name of an arbitrary readership goal. Whereas Claudia Roe acts as one of ENRON’s most present and vocal characters (even if her presence in the play does notably diminish with the rise of Skilling’s influence in the corporation), the female characters of Ink act less as voices for moral fortitude and more as objects upon which the negative effects of financial gain can be enacted. The characters of McKay, Rahn, and Hopkirk neglect to exercise their agency in any notably meaningful way across the extent of Ink, each of them suffering vocally without taking any major action against Lamb, Murdoch, or The Sun’s other staff generally. Roe, on the other hand, suffers in spite of her attempts to drag Enron out of the financial mess in which Skilling and Fastow embroiled it. FINISH
An important dramaturgical element for the morality play is the protagonist’s embodiment of sin or vice during his “fall” within the narrative. Whereas medieval morality plays demonstrated this by showing sin as dramatically characterized by “blasphemy and nonsense,” ENRON and Ink do so by demonstrating moments of the protagonist embodying the very capital which he has created (King 238). In act one, scene five of Prebble’s play, there is a moment in which Enron’s stock value, outperforming all previous records, begins rising with the positive timbre of Skilling’s press conference. Noticing this, Skilling tests out a hypothesis: “I’m a little sad? (It drops very slightly.) Ha! I’m Enron. (He’s delighted by his power and effect. Grinning at the recognition and level of belief.)” (27). This moment of monetary embodiment is not dropped after ENRON’s zenith; on the eve of the 2000 presidential election in which the company’s entire financial viability rests on the subsequent deregulations following a Bush victory, Skilling reacts more than verbally to a sudden realization of Gore’s likelihood of winning: “Without someone friendly to us right now, we’re dead (Skilling seems to be in pain; his stomach)” (54). Skilling, having begun his process of physically embodying Enron at its financial peak, now inherits the bodily maladies that accompany his decision. Though moments of similar symbolism are far more restrained in Ink, the theme is still present nonetheless. In one of the final scenes of the play, the above-mentioned Stephanie Rahn tells Larry Lamb “To think after this, I’ll go and we’ll probably never see each other again but we’re linked in this now. Handcuffed together, for all time. Isn’t that funny” (126). In one of his final lines moments later in the play, Lamb reflects: “I’m stuck with it, aren’t I? … She was right. That’ll be on my tombstone. My obituary, even, in the Sun! My own paper, how funny” (130). Lamb ends his time onstage with a mild moment of humor and self-recognition, one of the few insights into the human element of his character.
Perhaps the most important dramaturgical innovation brought to the modern morality play by Graham and Prebble is the set of techniques they use to emphasize the humanity of their protagonists. In medieval morality plays, a protagonist’s “ordinariness and universality” were expressed through their names, like Everyman or Mankind (Rozett 75). Whether it’s because their characters tend to be real people or they simply want to avoid a certain ham-fisted level of allegory, Prebble and Graham instead use very specific and differing ways in order to show and emphasize the human nature of their protagonists. Ink’s Larry Lamb has already held multiple high-ranking editorial positions in the British newspaper industry by the time he first appears onstage; consequently, Graham chooses not only to emphasize Lamb’s outsider background but also emphasize his exclusion from the corporate politics of Fleet Street. Crucially, Graham uses Murdoch in order to reveal key elements of Lamb’s past:
Murdoch What’s your father’s paper, what does he read?
Lamb He re – He used to read the Mirror
Murdoch See, used to – exactly. What does he read now?
Lamb Nothing. He’s dead.
Murdoch (beat) Why try harder to please them when they’re gone, don’t we? Funny. So give him a paper, Larry. Make a paper for him. The family he left behind –
Lamb Alright, you don’t … I don’t need you to romanticize my ‘eeh bah gum’ Yorkshire past (11-12)
After a failed attempt to appeal to Lamb’s humanity through appealing to his original status as an outsider, Murdoch then successfully indicates Lamb’s current status as an outsider:
Murdoch … The belief that they know best, that it’s their, what, ‘responsibility’ to reverse the poor democratic choices of the people they pretend to defend. And replace the government with their own committee, led by Mountbatten. A military coup.
Lamb I … I was – come on, I was there, at this time, at the Mirror, you think I wouldn’t have known the executives were plotting a – I was part of this circle.
Murdoch And yet funnily enough – you aren’t in the picture.
Lamb …
Murdoch Your people, Larry. There to hold power to account; always happens, as sure as the sun replaces the moon, the revolutionaries become the very elites they overthrew. (14)
The two above passages reflect two key techniques used by Graham in order to forge the character of Larry Lamb into a pseudo-Everyman. Firstly, Graham shows the failure of trying to emphasize Lamb’s working-class origins in wake of Lamb’s having been sufficiently subsumed into the culture of Fleet Street. Murdoch succeeds, however, when he shows Lamb’s presence on the lower rung of the editorial society he lives in; Graham imbues Lamb with a streak of workplace mediocrity and stagnation which not only slyly gives a decidedly upper-class character an undeniable aura of relatability, but it also gives Lamb sufficient reason to succumb to Murdoch’s offers. The second key technique of this scene is the vehicle through which Graham exposes Lamb’s Everyman-esque status: Murdoch. By eschewing the technique of demonstrating a protagonist’s relatability through his name, Graham is presented with the issue of producing the same effect without overwhelming the play’s opening with exposition. By using the character of Murdoch to frame Lamb’s “universality,” Graham not only achieves the desired effect but also uses the process of achieving that effect to give Murdoch with the additional aforementioned mystic power. Murdoch’s personal insight into Lamb serves as both demonstrates the core of Lamb’s character while simultaneously pushing that character towards his inevitable decline.
Though they both make many notable updates to the formula, both Ink and ENRON effectively assume the structure of the medieval morality play in order to make the same criticism of capitalistic excess that their medieval counterparts made of sins writ large. By adopting a protagonist whose humanity is covertly but unmistakably emphasized, Prebble and Graham provide an entry point into an economic world largely inaccessible to most and consequently track a vicious but ultimately comprehensible descent. Despite bearing the vestiges of a centuries-old dramatic form, both ENRON and Ink appropriately adopt and subvert many of the tenets of medieval morality drama in order to deliver a contemporary moral message in a theatrically complex way.
Works Cited –
Billington, Michael. “Making a Drama Out of the Economic Crisis.” The Guardian, 14
September 2009, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/sep/14/economic-crisis-david-hare-enron
Graham, James. Ink. London, Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017.
King, Pamela M. “Morality Plays.” The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre,
edited by Richard Beadle and Alan J. Fletcher, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. 235–262. Cambridge Companions to Literature.
Prebble, Lucy. ENRON. New York, Dramatists Play Service, 2011.
Rozett, Martha Tuck. “Morality Play Protagonists.” The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence
of Elizabethan Tragedy, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp. 74–107
The English & Drama Review at NYU 