Rohan Joshi’s eyes gleamed with messianic zeal as the new CEO of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling, impatient to drive the energy company forward into a new upward spiral of stock market success, based on ever-more arcane financial instruments and accounting methods, increasingly divorced from the underlying realities of actual business activity.

Enron was an inspired choice of play for the current times.It illustrates what can happen in a world where Might makes Right: a world which has lost its moral compass, and change is brought about not by church, state, political party, but by purely profit-seeking corporations.It illustrates the dangers inherent in a world where increasing sophistication and complexity of systems and structures has necessitated a general reliance on blind faith rather than genuine understanding. In the corporate world, share price is all.Great wealth can be derived from selling shares when the price is high, regardless of underlying realities.Yet share price itself is merely a transient articificial web of prediction, speculation, and tier upon tier of second-guessing.

This is the fourth play Elspeth Rogers has directed in St John’s.She has put together a smart, pacy production, aspiring to total inclusivity in college drama with “creatives of no or little experience”, and achieving great results from them.Clad in black and white businesswear, the ensemble of eleven support the four principals in swift transitions, in a variety of guises, from traders, accountants and lawyers to symbolic rodents and raptors.

Enron is described as a modern Greek tragedy. Rohan Joshi and Georgina Cooper (as Andy Fastow, the Chief Financial Officer who is the architect of the financial house of cards) rise to the challenge of portraying their initial glory in their own superior intellectual sophistication followed by mounting hysteria as the inevitability of collapse looms. Emily Dodds delivered Claudia Roe, the fictional character whom playwright Lucy Prebble has created to provide a challenge to the ruling mindset, with increasing confidence, suggesting what a different company Enron could have been under different leadership and with more worthy, down-to-earth, practical goals.

This was my first visit to the St John’s Garden Quadrangle Auditorium. It is quite a trek from the Porter’s Lodge! The comfortable (but perhaps excessively air-conditioned) 185-seater theatre was almost full to capacity, and I imagine will be packed out for the second and last performance tonight. It is wonderful that the students of Oxford can have access to drama of this quality at such a low price (tickets were only £5, or £2 for St John’s students). And it is comforting to hope that perhaps they have gleaned from drama like this some guiding principles which might help them one day make the world a fairer place.

St John's College only puts on one play a year,* but it's worth waiting for. Their resident undergraduate director Elspeth Rogers has an inspiring philosophy: everyone who auditions will get a part. This is inclusivity in action, and it means people who may never act in another play during their entire university careers will get a chance in the magnificent surroundings of the Garden Quad Theatre. Elspeth, we salute you.

St John's has developed quite a reputation over the last two years for mounting plays about the downfall of powerful but criminal American men. Last year it was Frost/Nixon, and now we've got ENRON, Lucy Prebble's breakthrough play about the demise of the evil energy corporation and its firebrand figurehead Jeffrey Skilling. What next? An adaptation of Netflix's Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich? Please, no.

ENRON is a meticulously researched expose of the false accounting, embezzling and corporate bullying that dragged Enron from being a multi-billion-dollar corporation to a value of under a dollar a share in the early years of this century. Rogers directs with stentorian precision, holding characters still, straight, plinth-mounted and face-on to the audience as they recount, in damningly documentary style, the facts that Skilling and his Igor-like accomplice, Andrew Fastow, are at such pains to conceal.

The show has many moments of chilling drama, particularly in the second half, as Skilling's world falls apart around him and he becomes an almost Shakespearean tragic figure, like Richard the Third, railing as his friends turn against him, desperate for one piece of luck to save the day. A deregulation, a deregulation, my kingdom for a deregulation. And the stunning costume coup of the "raptors", metaphorical dinosaurs ravenously devouring evidence of the company's debts, is strangely satisfying in its sheer, Hammer Horror excess. A velociraptor in a Gucci business suit says more in one toothy grin than a page of weasel words.

Following his star turn as President Richard Nixon last year, Rohan Joshi is back in the lead role, playing President (again) Skilling. Joshi is a major talent, and theatrical productions outside the walls of St John's must be desperate for him to audition, but it looks like they can't tempt him out. And Georgina Cooper, who played narrator-cum-researcher Jim Reston with such aplomb last year, returns in top form as CFO Fastow, architect of Enron's fake accounting.

What is very odd, however, is that neither Cooper nor Joshi adopt American accents for this production. We know they can do them. In fact, looking back at my review from last year, I even commented on how convincing they are. Yet this show is performed entirely in British English voices. You might think this is no big deal, but the dialogue feels so American. It's drawly, brash, suck-my-dick Wall Street banter, and in polite English brogue it sounds naked and vulnerable. Imagine Donald Trump saying, "I just grab 'em by the pussy" in the voice of King Charles, and you'll see what I mean.

The staging feels strangely muted too, as if it's been dialled back in the same way as the voices. Of course there is no need for this production to ape the original in any way. But where that had oodles of video effects, projection, wild inhuman dance and a ferocious pace, this has... less of that, and not much to replace it. The movement is occasionally frenetic, and the pace more focus than ferocious, like the Sex Pistols performing in the Bodleian Library without wanting to disturb the readers.

The pared-down style does also come with undeniable advantages. Skilling's final speech, "All humanity is here. There's Greed, there's Fear, Joy, Faith, Hope… And the greatest of these …is money" has the space to penetrate our heads and our hearts with its remorseless hubris. And Fastow's efforts to sell out his former boss in court come laden with self-doubt and recrimination. There is also a spine-tingling original score by Emmanuel de Vidal, mixing creepy barbershop quartets with unnerving scratches and haunting, distant snatches of melody. As a production, it's a genuine mixed bag.

You may wonder what the relevance is in retelling the cautionary tale of a company that went under for putting massive fake value on non-existent assets a quarter of a century ago. Surely the world has learned from that fiasco? Surely laws now prevent such irresponsible speculation? Not quite. The day after he became President last month, Donald Trump launched his own completely fictional crypto-currency, World Liberty Financial. Its only reality is the dimly-perceived value it has from one buyer to another. Could someone please summon the raptors?

*This may be about to change. You heard it here first.