Minerva, Chichester

It’s a sign of Chichester’s new adventurousness that, in partnership with Headlong and the Royal Court, it is staging theatre’s latest attack on corporate corruption. Lucy Prebble’s hugely ambitious play, covering the rise and fall of the Texan energy company, Enron, is an exhilarating mix of political satire, modern morality and multimedia spectacle.

Spanning the years between 1992 and the present, Prebble’s play makes Jeffrey Skilling, Enron’s top executive, the prime mover and principal villain, rather than Kenneth Lay, its founder. It is Skilling who gets the top job by coming up with a vision of the future: one in which Enron doesn’t merely provide natural gas but trades in energy, the internet and even the weather. But Skilling is aided by financial officer, Andy Fastow, who creates exotically named shadow companies in which Enron’s escalating debts are disguised as assets. Eventually the whole bubble bursts, with the company’s debts revealed as $38bn, Skilling sentenced to jail and Lay dying before being sentenced.

Prebble’s overwhelming point is that nothing has been learned: that, even as Enron employees were losing everything, others were pocketing fat bonuses, as they might today. But the virtue of both her play and Rupert Goold’s brilliant production is that they capture the dual face of capitalism: its turbulent energy and hubristic vanity. The first half of Goold’s production reminds one of Citizen Kane in its dazzling, vaudevillian energy: stock prices are imprinted on human faces, traders whirl and gyrate like dancers, analysts sing close harmony numbers. This is the free market as jazzy fantasy in which Skilling says of Enron, “we’re not just an energy company – we’re a powerhouse of ideas”.

Prebble and Goold, aided by Anthony Ward’s breathtaking designs, show that Enron was a vast fantasy in which everyone was complicit: not least the lawyers, analysts and investors who believed in this self-created bubble and kept it afloat. The power of Samuel West’s fine performance as Skilling lies in its very lack of demonism. In West’s assured hands, Skilling becomes a man who combines brilliance and stupidity and grows from a nerdy ordinariness into a tycoon through the idea that future income can be written down as earnings the moment a deal is signed.

Tim Pigott-Smith as Lay also rivetingly presents us with a devout, backslapping figure who sanctions Skilling’s dirty tricks without wanting to know the details. There is rich support from Tom Goodman-Hill as the innovative Fastow surrounded by red-eyed raptors devouring Enron’s debt and from Amanda Drew, playing the one person who seems to believe that profits must be related to productivity. Even if Enron isn’t the last word on the free market debacle, it is a fantastic theatrical event.