'You gotta love Hampstead Theatre. It’s the start of the autumn season, the most frenziedly competitive point of the theatrical calendar. And what does Edward Hall programme on its main-stage? A play about the origins and onset of the Latin American debt crisis of the Eighties. With a 14-strong cast of unknowns. The playwright? Beth Steel, the Nottingham coal-miner’s daughter who enjoyed award-winning success here two years ago with Wonderland, all about the miners’ strike'

'It’s quite a gamble, really – but it pays off handsomely... richly researched, it’s insistently useful and almost indecently entertaining.'

'It explores this through the contradictions of its central character, played by very bankable-looking newcomer Sean Delaney, fresh out of Rada.'

'The archetypal banker bogeyman (Tom Weston-Jones, superb) merely points at a lone desk, an “off-shore” fiscal dodge. Bang on the money, that gag.'

'The cast make the Mamet-like most of the zinging script, with assured work from Martin McDougall as the yo-yo spinning, boots-on-table bank exec, Elena Saurel as a canny economics journalist and a trio of Latin American government honchos played by one actor (Joseph Balderrama).'

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