HEADLONG

It's an incredible achievement to come up with a play with not a dull moment in it. But when that play is a three-hour black comedy about the ins and outs of corporate finance, it's time for a street party. Prebble and the director, Rupert Goold, not only address and explain previously bamboozling financial terms, in constantly stimulating, ingenious ways, they also keep an adroit balance between the epic and the intimate. This is political theatre that never, ever feels impersonal.

Blending song and dance with pithy and inventive scenes using every trick in the theatrical book, Enron doesn't overdose on hindsight. Instead, it recaptures the euphoria of Nineties success, as Samuel West's nerdy CEO Jeff Skilling reinvents the company thanks to his accounting innovations.

The entire cast of 16 is superb in a production that shows Goold's bold showmanship at its very finest, allied to a sense of empathy that makes this an emotional experience too...Nimble, funny, clear-eyed, inventive, informative, exhilarating and then sobering, relentlessly entertaining, surprisingly affecting, this is not to be missed. The political theatre of the 21st century has arrived, in some style.

Two years ago Rupert Goold, the finest director of his generation, hit the big time with an exhilarating Chichester production of Macbeth. He returns to the south coast with the highbrow hit of the year, the collapse of US energy giant Enron brilliantly reconfigured by Lucy Prebble as classical tragedy.

Aristotle himself would relish the hubris in this narrative of an overreaching organisation that plotted, Macbeth-like, to be king, this time of the financial markets. Prebble's great skill lies in her ability to take us through complex concepts with ease, without bemusing or, worse, patronising us. It incorporates all manner of innovations - stock-market analysts forming a barbershop quartet to sing Skilling's praises, the cast brandishing light-sabres to celebrate deregulation of the energy market - without ever losing sight of its primary focus. As the phrase goes, "buy now" for an outstanding evening.

Money, Philip Larkin concluded in one of his most haunting poems "is intensely sad". In Lucy Prebble's fantastic firecracker of a new play, brilliantly directed by Rupert Goold, money also proves exciting, sexy, merciless and ultimately tragic.

The play, in short, could hardly be more timely, one of those rare works that crystallises the mood of its age. What needs stressing equally strongly is that it is also hugely entertaining - and accessible even to dunderheads like me who wouldn't know a financial instrument from an instrument of torture, though they currently seem to be much the same thing as so many of us ponder lost investments and precarious futures.

Goold is in dazzling form as director, superbly capturing the greed and madness that seized Enron as debts were hidden in shadow companies, and the share price went through the roof. Down in the murky world of the finance department, actors dressed as voracious raptors are fed with dollar bills. Elsewhere, there are song and dance routines of great panache, and three performers dressed as the three blind mice come on like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, tapping their way across the stage with white sticks. The lack of naturalism in the production reflects the unreality of Enron itself, part hall of mirrors, part precarious house of cards vulnerable to the faintest nudge of healthy skepticism.

The whole show is driven by Samuel West, giving the performance of his career as Skilling.... Charismatic, scary, and finally cracking up spectacularly, this is high-definition acting of a very high order indeed. Enron... already looks like the play, and the production, that all the others will have to beat at this year's theatre awards.