Once upon a time, I kept up with the news. It was a habit that started when I did a politics degree, which coincided with the Russian state coming down and the IRA trying to blow Thatcher up. I also read Hunter S Thompson, who made following the news into an artform, stories turning up on the mojowire and sending him into a frenzy before spitting back his own incensed and partisan take on matters of the day. But over the years I’ve lost that fascination with information for its own sake. So, in recent years I’m aware of controversy around, say, Bill Clinton without being sure of the details. Ditto any of the more recent Tory leaders. And then there are nouns which surface and have little real hold on my consciousness, though I’m aware they have significance in the wider scheme. Blackwater. Intifada. Enron.

So when a friend said she’d bought us tickets to see a celebrated production of a play about the American electricity-to-everything supplier Enron, I was pleased. My trips to the theatre are rare, and this one was a doozy. Scripted by Lucy Prebble, Enron is a scathing trip into the Looking Glass world that is corporate high finance. Clearly Lucy has done her research, and used it not to present mere reportage, but to conjure the characters and court they inhabit, in which real world cause and effect, action and consequences, are abandoned in favour of a topsy turvy world where profit counts above anything else. As such, it’s a story that has its precedents in the likes of 18th century tulip fever, when fortunes were won and lost on growing and importing Dutch tulip bulbs…when they weren’t eaten by sailors who mistook the bulbs for onions.

Enron is a tale about hubris then, of men and women devising systems to make themselves wealthy in the face of any logic. The company prided itself on thinking outside the box, and in the process abandoned any connection to the sort of economics where actual people create actual goods which are bought and sold. Instead, it jumped wholehearted into the wibbly wobbly world of trading intangibles, such as the predicted cost of electricity at some point in the future. Only, such fancies have unanticipated feedback loops back to the world of matter, in this case leading to black-outs in the state of California. But hey, the lawyers can magic any attending problems away, right?

Not even the laws of physics would stop Enron’s leaders in their tracks. Having decided that they were going to offer video-on-demand to consumers, the realisation that bandwidth at the time couldn’t cope with the concept was not well received. Instead, it led to Enron trading in bandwidth like it did in other ephemerals.

Such hubris cannot go unpunished, and it was fascinating to see how the play presented the company’s downfall. The key was in hiding debts within companies that it owned 97% of, and redefining the sums of money so they no longer appeared to be debts. Nonsense on stilts, basically, and the massive debts lurking in the backs of the company managers’ minds were presented on stage as suited raptors, darting about the stage with red eyes, which themselves connected to another of the play’s visual metaphors. The effect was powerful and visually striking, and entirely apt to the state of mind of the power-crazed leaders of the company that America took to its heart for a while.

Enron went way beyond reportage into creating a play that is a powerul commentary on the state of contemporary business. The script and performances are moving, funny, scarcely believable while at the same time clearly grounded in truth. There’s no surer way to present satire than to offer a mirror to the world, and that’s precisely what this incisive play does — see if you can book a ticket while it’s still on in London.