A look back in anger at how we got a crash course in financial reality

Nicholson is the twice Oscar-nominated writer, for the movies

Shadowlands and Gladiator.

Hollywood might have feted him, but when it comes to writing he's not afraid to go to where the next project will get the best showing, which is why he's in Leeds, to see the world premiere of his latest play, Crash, being staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse tonight.

Timely is barely the word for it. Around lunchtime today we will know the extent of the Comprehensive Spending Review. Arts organisations across the country are quivering at the prospect of cuts and

Nicholson's play, which deals with the financial crisis, brings the origins of current woes into sharp light.

"It is pure coincidence that the play opens the same day as the cuts are announced," he says. "When I wrote it, 18 months ago, I truly thought the subject matter would be out of date by now.

"However, the spending cuts are intimately connected to the credit crunch, there is an absolute link. The banking crisis is not the only factor, but it is a very significant factor. This financial catastrophe is going to affect everybody, for a generation."

At 62, Nicholson, a documentary maker for the BBC before writing success took him to Hollywood, has wisdom in spades and is unafraid to take a rigid stands on subjects he understands well. While he remains on the fence when it comes to the proposed cuts, he is more bullish about the financial crash.

"I understand the credit crunch because I have made it my business to understand, I've really worked at it. I understand why it happened, who did it, and who's to blame," says Nicholson, a thought which should have people salivating – the Cambridge graduate is a smart man and a brilliant writer.

"The problem is we are fearful because such a huge PR job has been done by the City for so long. We have been told that what it does is far too complicated for us little people, that our tiny brains can't cope with it and we fell for the trick.

"It's simply not true. Why would it be? These people are not cleverer than you or I."

And do it, he did. Nicholson immersed himself in the world of finance to understand why the banking system collapsed. The result, Crash, tells the story of Goldman Sachs trader Nick, who has it all. His old friend Humphrey is an artist with strong ideals who's married to Christine, a teacher and the only woman Nick has ever truly loved.

Reunited when Nick "invests" in a piece of Humphrey's art, old

insecurities resurface.

The play pits the artist against the banker to ask the question, "How much is any of us worth?" Nicholson hopes the play will send people home angry.

"The major conclusion I have come to is that the people responsible for the credit crunch are not wicked or stupid, they are average," he says. "As average people, they were doing a good job so long as the wind was fair. They got caught in a storm, they couldn't handle it and the ship went down.

"Truly wise and remarkable people would have realised it was a bubble, that the financial instruments they were using to make money were toxic, but they were neither wise, nor remarkable – but average."

For Nicholson, this realisation led to a number of questions. If the bankers were average, why were they paid such obscene amounts?

"They lost all sense of the size of money they were dealing with, so they felt these grotesque sums were completely normal," he says.

"The more I considered it, the more I realised that these people regularly taking home 5m, the fact that so many of them are

billionaires, has had a profoundly distorting effect on our society.

"Everyone's sense of wealth is relative. If we say that you are not taken seriously as a person unless you have at least 10m in liquid assets, that is extremely destabilising.

"It doesn't matter if there are one or two extraordinary people who make a lot of money, like Phillip Green, that doesn't destabilise society, but we've had an entire sector – thousands of people earning these sums of money

"We have grovelled, as a society, at the feet of the very rich and said to them, 'You make these extraordinary amounts of money, you must be extraordinary, tell us how to live'.

"That has deeply damaged our society and that makes me angry."

n Crash, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, to November 13.

n Go to www.yorkshirepost. co.uk/booksoutloud to hear an interview with William Nicholson. A review of Crash will appear in the Yorkshire Post on Friday.