Article on CRASH for The Times, October 6th 2010

Some writers begin with an image, others with a single provocative sentence. In my own case it's most often an emotion. 'Shadowlands' began with the fear of commitment. My work on 'Gladiator' began with the need for love to reach beyond death. My new play, 'Crash', began with a feeling of bewildered anger. I remember the trigger moment perfectly. It was a headline in the Financial Times of March 21 2009: Anger erupts on both sides of the Atlantic – Mounting fear of talent exodus from big names – Banker fury over tax 'witch-hunt'.

This 'banker fury' gave rise to an answering eruption of anger in me. How come they don't get that they're the muggers here, not the victims? And they still don't get it, even today. Two weeks ago at a City gathering to restore 'values and trust' the Chairman of Barclays claimed that the City had become a 'scapegoat' for the public's anger. A scapegoat is an innocent creature made to bear the blame or the sins of others. But the bankers are not innocent. Their behaviour caused this crisis. Their refusal to show contrition, let alone to make some kind of amends, so enraged me that I began to suspect my own response. What was I so worked up about? Was it just envy? It felt like something more righteous, as if some deep sense of justice had been affronted. After all, the crisis we call the credit crunch has caused our economy to contract and our national deficit to balloon. Next Wednesday, coincidentally on my play's opening night, we'll learn how we're going to pay for it, in cuts to our services and increases in our taxes. At the same time, the City is preparing to hand out bonuses totalling £7 billion – back to the levels of 2004.

I remember 2004. I remember the golden years when house prices rose and rose, and the brightest and the best took their Oxbridge Firsts into the City, and a new superclass of financial overlords were rewarded with wealth beyond imagining. We wondered a little what could make them worth so much. We were assured that they were the engine of wealth for everyone. They were the geese that laid the golden eggs. Until one day they laid a very big, very bad egg. Imagine our surprise! It turned out the overlords had screwed up, and had made us all poor.

Only then did it dawn on me that I'd fallen for the old Scott Fitzgerald fantasy, that the rich are different from you and me. Without ever exploring my assumptions, I had come to believe that anyone who could make such stupendous sums of money must be brilliant in a way I couldn't even conceive. Why didn't I question this years ago? Why didn't I remind myself of my university contemporaries who had gone into banking, and reflect that they hadn't seemed unusually clever at the time? But I was too dazzled by the sheer scale of their wealth. Somehow it's a really hard notion to get your head around, that someone can become extremely rich for no very good reason at all.

Back then, in March 2009, when I felt the first stirrings of anger, my immediate need was for an outlet for my emotions. I wanted to stage an imaginary confrontation with a banker, force him to justify his wealth, and then demolish his arguments. As the writer I would be in control of the encounter, and so of course I would win. Then maybe I'd feel better.

It seemed to me that the right medium for this was the stage, following in a long and honourable tradition of polemical plays. But even as I muttered and frothed, I knew I would have to get better informed about my subject. So I began the process of examining the whole issue more deeply.

First I had to plunge myself into unfamiliar territory, the world of finance. I read a number of excellent books, and I tracked the ever-unfolding story in newspapers and magazines. In the beginning I think I assumed that the world of modern finance would be beyond me, as, say, higher mathematics is beyond me. This was the last knockings of my belief that highly-rewarded bankers are exceptional people. But quite soon I found I was able to grasp the outlines of the crisis. So many experts and insiders have written about it that anyone can master the credit crunch, given the will. If you only have time for one book, I recommend Michael Lewis's 'The Big Short'.

What you will learn, as I learned, is that the people running the banks didn't understand their own complex financial instruments, the sub-prime mortgage-backed assets. That they never examined their contents. That they sold them on at great profit to themselves without regard to the contagion of bad debt. That the ratings agencies colluded in this trade in disguised junk. And that no one wanted to be left out while the good times rolled.

Slowly I came to realise that the bankers were neither wicked nor stupid. They were just doing their job, seeking the highest short-term return available. They didn't ask about the content of the CDOs they were selling, or about the systemic effect of their trades, because they didn't need to. They were not rewarded for sustaining the world's financial system. They were rewarded for making money right now.

I began to feel what it must be like to be an investment banker. Every minute of every day you're under immense pressure to deliver results, results as good as or better than your competitors. These pressures come from all of us, the great mass of small investors who demand that our savings and pensions go on growing. I learned from Michael Lewis's book that there were a few who foresaw the crash, but they were strange and solitary and exceptional. You have to be exceptional to stand out against herd wisdom. And so I came to the simple obvious conclusion: most bankers are not exceptional people. Why did we ever think they were?

Because they earn so much.

This then became the heart of the play I was starting to write. Not an attack on the greed of evil bankers after all, but the far harder question: what are any of us worth?

An economist will tell you that pay is determined by the market, not by some higher notions of social value. I accept this. I see no feasible method of stopping banks paying their high-fliers huge bonuses if it's in their interests to do so. Whatever taxes or regulations we devise, they'll find a way to reward their stars.

But there is another approach. Bankers demand and get such absurd rewards because it's the only way they know how to measure their level of respect. The problem is more cultural than financial. How can we show as a society that we respect most those who contribute most, rather than the merely rich?

I wrote my play as one tiny push in this direction. It still features one big speech which contains all my anger intact. But as the characters came to life they took unexpected turns. The final coup de theâtre – an actual crash – was no part of the original plan. So despite writing both sides of the argument, I'm not at all sure any more that I've won.

Writing a play is one thing. Getting it staged, particularly an ideas play, is something else. My play went the rounds of the managements, and twice came near to acceptance, but both times the producers backed away. Time was passing. I feared my subject was already out of date. Then, early this year, I learned that the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds was interested.

Since then I've done a great deal of work on the text, and the subject matter has grown more not less topical. 'Crash' is designed to play its part in a needed public discussion: have we gone too far in our worship of wealth? Have we allowed money to become the sole measure of worth? Perhaps the bankers are both muggers and victims – guilty scapegoats onto whom we load our sins.

Our punishment is that we now face many years of painful austerity. The very theatre that will give my play life, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, is sustained by public subsidy. In this new world of cuts, who knows what future it faces? On Wednesday afternoon George Osborne will put us all out of our suspense. And on Wednesday evening my play will open.