Enron

So what price 'Enron'? Canny folks who've snagged tickets to the Royal Court's sold-out run of Rupert Goold's latest smash could tout them for upwards of £100. Isn't that what Enron's mouthy bunch of macho whiz-kid traders would do? Judging by their gang rape of California's deregulated electricity market (brilliantly imagined here as a pumped-up battle with lightsabers), they'd have bought up all the tickets at subsidised rates then flogged them back to desperate theatre-goers for quadruple the price. No wonder the Sunshine State turned to Arnie for protection.

The question of what Enron the company was really worth is at the centre of Lucy Prebble's dramatic reconstruction of the biggest corporate bankruptcy in FTSE history. Under its Bush-buddy chairman Kenneth Lay and his smart guy chief exec, Jeffrey Skilling, Enron's share-price sky-rocketed. But Skilling's favoured 'mark-to-market' accounting system, which allowed the company to ascribe instant notional value to ideas which might pay off in future, turned into a Faustian instrument when it tempted him to disguise billion-dollar losses as profits.

Prebble's play gives us a sympathetic intro to Skilling as a visionary accounting nerd surrounded by corporate whores. And actor Samuel West superbly charts his journey from tombstone-faced boffin (with interpersonal skills as skewed as his combover) to suave and criminally optimistic master of the universe. But this is no dry leftist drama. Prebble and Goold's dazzling greed-powered fantasia hits the same jackpot as 'Black Watch': a script with documented reality behind it is staged as an all-singing, all-dancing piece of theatrical expressionism. In this surreal spectacle, complex financial instruments and corporate entities are portrayed with satirical clarity. Lehman Brothers is a pair of Siamese twins who share one trench-coat. Enron's board is three blind mice. And Enron's increasingly deranged chief of finance, Andy Fastow, (the excellent Tom Goodman-Hill) is circled by raptors who represent the shadow companies he has created to eat Enron's debts.
The Damoclesian triumph of 'Enron' is to make you feel how thrilling it must have been to make such a killing. Director Goold, whose unrivalled flair sometimes has a hollow and hyperactive edge, has found a brilliant match in slick dot-com bubble capitalism: share prices and graphs ripple over the faces of the actors and the backdrop of Anthony Ward's design, a mirrored tower which mimics Enron's Houston skyscraper.

Yes, we should make it clear in the small print that this is neither a go-to guide to the credit crisis nor a colossal era-defining dramatic riposte to capitalism. But it's too smart and brilliantly textured by its top-notch cast to be merely 'Enron: The Musical'. And, in advance of the West End transfer, it's the gold-standard show that everyone wants to buy into - ironic, as that's exactly what they used to say about Enron…