HEADLONG

Lucy Prebble's dazzling political drama about the collapse of Enron makes her the natural successor to Caryl Churchill.

Making the virtual look real, turning ideas into flesh, is part of the business of theatre. How better to give life to the illusions of finance, of trading in futures. As is proved by Rupert Goold's tremendous production - for Headlong and the Royal Court - of 28-year-old Lucy Prebble's first-rate new play. Dazzle and evanescence is everywhere: the evening twists continually between the actual and the insubstantial. This is one of the most incisive, most grown-up political dramas of the past 10 years.

Written acerbically, staged like a hi-tech danse macabre, Enron dramatises the rise and fall of the energy company which was once America's seventh largest corporation. It buoyantly explains mark-to-market and hedging. It points with absolute clarity to the decisive shift in power from palaces and governments to corporations. It demonstrates the faith that kept the whole hollow enterprise afloat.

A confluence of skills - Anthony Ward's set, Mark Henderson's lighting, Jon Driscoll's video and Adam Cork's soundscape - creates a reverberating cathedral of light and darkness, a mammon heaven. Market figures run continuously in a strip of scarlet neon. Fluorescent tubes dangle from the roof, flushing red, white and blue at the time of the Bush election, and later turning into lime-green Jedi swords. A chorus is covered in illuminated columns of numbers, converted from characters into financial artefacts. The Enron logo appears high above the stage, as does a pumped-up chief, addressing his staff like a preacher in a pulpit; when the word "GOLD" flashes up there, it's easy to miss the "L".

At the centre of all this is an unholy trinity of men fuelled by rapacious intellect, a hunting instinct and messianic zeal. As Ken Lay, the founder of the company, Tim Pigott-Smith has absolute bruising assurance. The fine Tom Goodman-Hill is intent as Andy Fastow, the man who applied his ingenuity to manufacturing debt-concealing companies. Samuel West is powerfully intelligent as Jeff (all these big blokes have diminutive names) Skilling, the ex-Harvard star who as CEO set about transforming Enron from a direct provider of electricity and gas into a market-maker in energy derivatives. He begins as a beefy, overgrown schoolboy, with rolling gait and a neck poking out of an uncomfortable collar; he gets sleeker, losing his specs and tufty hair; he ends as a stomach-clutching shambles. He "just wanted to change the world", he explains, and it's part of Enron's triumph that he's neither demonised nor let off the hook. Nor is Amanda Drew's utterly persuasive, hard-edged aspirer: she may have her feet on the ground but you couldn't say her heart is in the right place.

The fully human mingles with the cartoon. The Lehman brothers appear as conjoined twins, trapped in the one coat; Enron's accountants, Arthur Andersen, are a ventriloquist and his dummy; Fastow's debt-eating entities crawl on as voracious raptors with ember-red eyes. The traders perform a barber-shop number.

It's astonishing that this is only Prebble's second play. Her first, The Sugar Syndrome, was a gem, but Enron is of a different order. It can be seen as the successor to Caryl Churchill's Serious Money. But it is also its own magnetic thing. Put your money on it being a sell-out when it moves to the Royal Court this autumn.

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.