Serious Money, Caryl Churchill’s ruthless examination of the ‘greed is healthy’ financial world of the late 1980s, still has a powerful impact, despite today’s more general understanding of the tendency for disgraceful behaviour by bankers and other speculators.

Last week’s production by the talented actors of the Oxford School of Drama, under freelance director Jessica Swale, did full justice to the innovative features of the play. These include the unlikely disposition of the characters to address each other in rhyming couplets and to be transported in the twinkling of an eye from trading floor to discotheque. (Dancing is clearly not overloooked in the OSD course.) What it could not, disguise, however, is the difficulty the piece poses to anybody for whom the Financial Times is not required daily reading. Precisely what the crooks were up to remained beyond my ken, despite close attention. There remained absolutely no doubt, though, who the baddies were.

Chief among them was corporate raider Billy Corman, portrayed with such gleeful villainy by Christopher Jamieson as to convince he would prove a perfect (hardly the mot juste) Iago. Relishably wicked, too, were Jessica Burgess as shady Peruvian Jacinta Condor working to divert as much as possible of her country’s limited resources into her coffers, and Kate Dylan as tough-cookie US arbitrageur (what that?) Marylou Baynes.

As for the better-behaved, there was splendid work from Alexandra Dowling as a feisty dealer, Scilla Todd, fearlessly hunting those responsible for the death of her brother Jake (Dan Ritchie), who had ventured too deep into murky waters patrolled by financial sharks.