By James Hadley in London

Investigating foreshadowings of the financial recession may be timely, but the stuff of great theatre? I was sceptical. But the five star reviews which 'Enron' by Lucy Prebble has received were clearly justified.

After making its debut at the Chichester Festival, then selling out a run at the Royal Court Theatre,  'Enron' transferred to the Noel Coward Theatre in the West End early this year.

It's directed by Rupert Goold, who continues his reign as one of the most prominent directors in the West End, and his versatility is evident in the way the production combines moments of musical and dance theatre in its staging. It's very much an ensemble production, with the company of actors playing the Enron employees filling the stage with bustling energy on a set which consists primarily of fluorescent lighting tubes which ascend and descend between floor and ceiling.

Lucy Prebble's script really manages to put the human interest centrestage in a story that could have been as heartless as its corporate subject.

In the central role of Jeffrey Skilling, the financial whizz kid who built Enron into a very prominent castle in the sky, Samuel West achieves a sympathetic portrayal. This is no mean feat, considering we're watching a man who walked away from a company with millions and millions of dollars in his pocket and his employees not only jobless but bereft of their savings and pensions.

It's very much to the credit of Prebble's script that we see a rounded character with clear motivations, a charismatic inner drive, and misgivings about his choices in relation to the example it sets to his young daughter.

Similarly complex and uncompromising are the motivations on display in Amanda Drew's performance as his arch rival. Again, the strength of Prebble's script is that she turns the wider story of the energy giant company's rise and fall into a human-scale story of individuals with strong agendas that conflict with each other.

And not only do the individual stories work as a condensed focus of the wider financial drama, but the story of this company's short-sighted and self-involved financial excesses are a remarkably enlightening mirror through which to view the more recent fallouts of the financial crisis in the banking sector.

I have very little understanding of capitalism at this sort of level, but this is theatre that makes you relate to the issues. Goold's inventive production isn't gimmicky, but uses straightforward devices to make concepts more easily understandable.

The best example of this was where Skilling's sidekick, Andy Fastow, is explaining his theory of hiding debt through investment in shadow companies, and actors masked as dinosaur raptors personify these shadow companies, literally eating at the debt recorded in pages and pages of accounts.

Simple but effective metaphors like this are scattered throughout the production in an unflashy way, resulting in deceptively well-crafted drama of great relevance to our times.