Enron

The upper echelons of Enron considered themselves the smartest guys in the room; whether you agree depends on whether you call it smart to persuade people that an energy company with no actual energy to sell is the best thing to happen to America since the discovery of oil. As Jeffrey Skilling, the first but sadly not the last guy to package up a big sample of nothing and sell it to a greedy public, Samuel West oozes self-belief; his boss, Ken Lay (Tim Pigott-Smith) and stooge, Andy Fastow (Tom Goodman-Hill) end up smeared with it.

But Lucy Prebble's play is rather more than a simple tale of hubris humbled - for one thing, there's a notable absence of humility, despite deaths caused, livelihoods lost and heroes of the stock market brought low. Rupert Goold's terrific if unsubtle production reinforces this: Skilling despises his colleagues for applauding his mark-to-market concept without understanding it, yet builds his company's reputation on that very ignorance, so we get blindfolded lawyers, ventriloquist accountants and a board made up of three blind mice. Lay, meanwhile, sees the fall of the twin towers purely in terms of its disastrous impact on his company, and watching him pontificate from behind a projection of tragedy in action makes you feel sick, in the best possible sense.

All the way through, we are bombarded with versions of the male hunter-gatherer-inventor-provider instinct gone horribly awry: the light sabres illuminating the set, Fastow's raptors in the basement chowing down secret debt and the harsh treatment meted out to the one woman who dares crash this boys' club all go some way - as far as is possible, perhaps - to answering the question that both defined and torpedoed Enron: why?