What we get is a playwright painstakingly trying, from a position of almost total ignorance, to learn how the crisis came about. From such a low starting point, he questions economics teachers, intellectuals, bankers, traders, hedge funders, civil servants, journalists — many of them actually named, such as "George Soros", "Howard Davies", "Ronald Cohen", "Adair Turner", "David Freud" and other real people, who presumably okayed the words Hare puts into their mouths — and he arrives at the best, fairest, simplest and clearest explanation of the whole thing that I have come across (apart from Bird and Fortune's immortal comic explanation of subprime loans, to be found on YouTube). There will certainly be those who don't agree with every aspect of Hare's "story". And I am not sure that a theatregoer with very little previous knowledge of this subject would be able to follow him right through. But it is certainly worth the effort. 

As one might expect, nobody comes out of this well, not even the relatively good guys. One who comes out particularly badly is Gordon Brown. Hare's characters skewer him without mercy and "Hare" appears to accept their evidence. "Brown was completely uninterested in regulation," says "Howard Davies" (an actor playing the real-life first chairman of the "light-touch" Financial Services Authority, which Brown set up). "He never made any criticism of anything we did." Another character says, "Brown was happy with the City so long as it generated huge amounts of cash" — an incredible 27 per cent of his total tax take, according to another. "It was his cash cow. Of course he wasn't going to regulate it." "Howard Davies" and "David Freud" strongly blame Brown for "stoking up the boom, just when he should have been doing the opposite", for a general election that never happened. "You say Brown is clever," says "Freud". "I don't think he's clever." 

All this is extremely interesting for those interested in such things (and the house was packed). But it isn't theatre. And if not, should it be in a theatre? To ask that is perhaps unfair to the production and to the actors, who managed to prevent a very dense text from being boring. But shouldn't such a creation be presented in the Royal Geographical Society debating chamber or one of this country's great civic halls?

Or is it, on the other hand, a new departure in theatre proper, which theatrical conventions can perfectly well accommodate? The theatre of explication, perhaps? Journodrama? What David Hare has written is something very hard to find anywhere else — a demanding, well-considered analysis intended to enlighten and arouse a passionate response, and meant to be shared in public. If that is not theatre, it is close.