The Insider takes a serious look at major financial fraud. Based on the investigation of a tax-refund scam, operated by multiple international banks, it focuses on a single lawyer who decided to admit to his own involvement and become an informer. With the actor encased in a transparent cage and dialogue piped into earphones, the production is claustrophobic, intense and ferocious. Describing the strategy in detail and taking on the characteristics of an interrogation, its script is simultaneously an explanation of this fraud and a taut study of one man’s conscience.

In just over an hour, The Insider seeks to identify a corruption at the heart of contemporary global capitalism. There are allusions to evolutionary biology as a justification for the rapacious behaviour of the financial classes, while we witness the human consequences of what at first appears to be merely an exploitation of certain legal loopholes. The unnamed protagonist has opportunities to demonstrate his humanity, yet he is exposed as complicit in a system that not only oppresses society but believes that it is morally correct. Jumping between different time periods, the production’s disorientation mirrors the violent consequences of big-business machinations. 

This is urgent theatre. If the protagonist appears one-dimensional, and his boss an almost Bond-villain caricature, the show’s message is uncompromising. A brief scene which follows our protagonist as he celebrates his financial windfall articulates heartlessness, decadence, and moral weakness. The Insider exposes both human and systematic wickedness. 

The Insider, ZOO Southside, until 27 August, 4.30pm.