Enron's flop on Broadway shows culture gap between US and UK

Enron may have wowed the West End but a US audience is a very different animal, says Jerry de Groot.

Enron at Broadhurst Theatre
Enron will close on Broadway after just 15 performances Credit: Photo: ALAMY

New York can be a brutal place. That was demonstrated this week with the savagery inflicted on Enron, the hugely successful British play recently exported to America. The play lies mortally wounded at the Broadhurst Theatre. Death is scheduled for Sunday, after only 15 performances.

The decision to kill the play was made after it failed to land a major Tony Awards nomination. In truth, the fatal blow fell last week when the New York Times critic Ben Brantley slammed the "flashy but laboured economics lesson" that was "all show and little substance". That criticism will undoubtedly confuse the British audience. After all, the Brits are supposed to give the Americans culture while the Americans give us hamburgers.

The strange death of Enron has baffled its Broadway producers, especially since London critics lavished it with superlatives. The answer to that conundrum might lie in ugly American xenophobia – the writer Lucy Prebble and director Rupert Goold are British. "There seems to be some sort of resentment about an English playwright and director telling us an American story," said James Gunderson, the American co-producer of Enron.

Since 9/11 the insular Americans have become terribly sensitive to criticism. They don't mind when Jon Stewart dumps bucketloads of heavy-handed political satire on the Daily Show, but they get tetchy when the criticism is delivered with an English accent. I encountered the same prejudice in 2006 when I tried to sell my iconoclastic history of the Apollo programme to a US publisher. "It's a good story," an editor at Simon and Schuster replied, "but American readers won't tolerate a British author telling it."

Nor did it help when I mentioned that I'm actually American (though I've lived in Britain for 30 years). That, in fact, probably made it worse, since an American who criticises his home country from a British bolthole, is tantamount to a traitor.

Nevertheless, while xenophobia seems a handy explanation for Enron's failure (and one that allows the British to feel smug), it's not the whole story. The simple reason why some things work well here and don't over there is because two very different cultures exist on either side of the Atlantic. Too often, we wrongly assume that because we speak the same language a kinship exists.

That point was driven home when the British decided to transplant the US phenomenon of presidential debates to our parliamentary system. What resulted was a crude copy. While Americans usually enjoy a dignified debate about issues, we got a flashy, sordid and shallow personality contest. Dissonance was compounded because our party leaders decided that all they had to do was imitate Barack Obama, an assignment not only misguided but impossible. When Obama talks of speaking to a plumber in Pittsburgh, it sounds genuine. When David Cameron recalls a conversation with a butcher in Macclesfield, it inevitably sounds contrived.

The British attempt wasn't a debate; it was a talent contest. On ITV's post-debate analysis, James Mates introduced the results of the network's instant poll by saying: ''Let's see which candidate has the X-Factor." By that stage, I expected Davina McCall to come on and tell Brown that he wouldn't be returning the following week.

Cultural exchange is a good thing. Some wonderful US shows are on British television, and we have sent some sublime dramas to the States. But it will always be a risky game, as Enron shows. Any transplant must be sensitive to the peculiar characteristics of home soil. If you seek mindlessly to imitate, you risk producing a second-rate, exaggerated version of the genuine article.

Buy tickets to the UK production of Enron from Telegraph Box Office