David Hare is brilliant on last year's financial crash

Drama out of a crisis

David Hare may be the best journalist ever to find work as a playwright. I may be rarely convinced by his straight plays, but with Via Dolorosa (1998), about the Middle East, The Permanent Way (2004), about the crisis in the railway industry, and now The Power of Yes, about the global financial meltdown, he has proved himself the pioneer of not so much a new kind of theatre as a new kind of journalism - a journalism that uses theatre to deliver what Harry Evans used to call "scoops of understanding". The only faintly clunky moments in this latest piece are when it sounds too much like Radio 4's Analysis (Announcer: "David Marsh again . . ."). Generally The Power of Yes is not only enlightening - financially and psychologically - but biting, witty fun.

It is because this is a "story" not a play, as The Power of Yes states at the beginning, that Hare is liberated. He does not need to create fictional characters, something for which he has no special talent. The stage is instead peopled with actors impersonating his interviewees, most of whom were willing to be named: the investor-philanthropist George Soros, the foul-mouthed ex-FSA chairman Howard Davies, the turncoat government adviser David Freud, and so on. The stage is crammed with more business suits than even Michael Frayn managed in Democracy, but the men who fill them are, fortunately, epigrammatic cynics to a man. In what I take to be a little joke against Hare's sentimental habit of investing young middle-class women with virtue, the playwright (played in the author's cord jacket and sawn-off tie, although not his tonsure, by Anthony Calf) is led through the tale by an omniscient but plain-speaking eastern European journalist named Masa (Jemima Rooper).

The evening opens strongly with the playwright being given advice by the banking class on how to write his play: so used are they to calling the shots that they simply cannot stop themselves. But Hare soon builds a damning case against them. Some of their cock-ups are familiar - sub-prime mortgages, securitised credit arrangements - but not all of them. I had never heard of Myron Scholes, inventor of a "foolproof" mathematical investment equation. In 1997 he won the Nobel Prize; a year later his hedge fund went bust and was later found guilty of tax evasion. These men were blinded not merely by greed, but by herd instinct, the sheer love of the deal ("the thing itself") and by the benign neglect of governments that lived off the taxes they paid. During Brown's boom, the City accounted for 9 per cent of the British economy and 27 per cent of the tax take.

The director Angus Jackson's staging uses everything from bicycles to blackboards to make words visual. When Warhol's "Sex is nostalgia for sex" is quoted in relation to Fred Goodwin's compulsive deal-making, Goodwin's face is projected in a parody of Warhol's lurid Monroe prints. I was surprised only that more was not made of a Damien Hirst sculpture of a bull with two golden horns, sold for £10.3m in the week in which Lehman Brothers went down. The Golden Bull - as in market - would have made a better title than The Power of Yes (teenage gang-speak, I am told).

Hare's leftist politics hardly make him a neutral journalist. He turns the socialist Labour MP Jon Cruddas into an oracle (wouldn't we have preferred Vince Cable's wisdom?) and misattributes to George Bush Bill Clinton's desire to turn America's poor into property owners. His conclusion, that the recession announced the end of the idea that markets are wise, is not only a little lame (requiring a coda of additional lessons from the cast) but brings him strangely into line with Goodwin who, we are told, is furious the market did not behave rationally.

Understandably, Hare did not get anywhere near the former RBS chief executive, but Sir Fred is not the only spectre at this still considerable feast. The face and gnomic wisdom of Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, are repeatedly projected, godlike, from a screen but, dramatically speaking, we need Hare to confront him personally. Instead we get a final encounter in Manhattan with Soros, who has been on the stage plenty, and who merely quotes Greenspan. The other Banquo is the BBC's ubiquitous Robert Peston. He either did not speak to Hare or, quite possibly, said nothing quotable. Cloned on stage instead is Newsnight's Paul Mason. Peston sat in front of me on press night, static and mirthless; at the end, he must have been one of only a handful whose applause was no more than polite. A drama out of a crisis? The Power of Yes comes nearer than perhaps even Hare hoped.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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