American-born Ayad Akhtar’s play Disgraced won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2013. His latest (premièred in its full form off Broadway the following year, and now staged in Britain by the Tricycle’s artistic director Indhu Rubasingham) is a fiendishly clever examination of religious, political and economic beliefs, how they intertwine and conflict, what unites and divides us.

Akhtar begins by taking an all too common phenomenon and giving it an entirely plausible quarter twist. An American, a middle-ranking Citibank employee, has been kidnapped by mistake in a backwater in Sindh: his Pakistani insurgent captors wanted his boss. Their ransom for him is impossibly high, so... and here is the stroke of authorial brilliance... he volunteers to earn it for them by playing the markets. For the remaining three-quarters of the play we see not only hostage-drama tropes such as attempted escape, execution threats and so on, but also captive Nick teaching London-born zealot Bashir how to make trades and trying to impress upon the group’s leader Imam Saleem how to husband and, later, launder the proceeds.

Daniel Lapaine and Parth Thakerar mesh well as Nick and Bashir. The group’s communitarian vision (they are not Taliban, Daesh or al-Qaeda, but a local group professing an aim to improve the lot of “the people”) proves an unlikely ally with Nick’s free-market maxims that currency is power, self-interest the crucial motivator and that the invisible hand of the market always regulates matters overall. Tony Jayawardena’s Imam Saleem is both dignified and menacing, and provides the proof that greed is both a powerful driver and the downfall of those who do not know when to stop. Rubasingham punctuates scenes with glaring lights to disguise scene changes, and works her cast with beautiful discretion. Akhtar keeps a remarkable even-handed perspective without ever succumbing to pious moral equivalence. These ideologies, he suggests, are neither philosophically nor pragmatically incompatible; we know, after all, how Daesh/ISIS fund themselves by trading in oil.

He makes a persuasive case that ultimately, belief in the invisible hand of the free market is as much an article of faith as “There is no God but Allah”, at once fervently professed yet in practice mutable.

Written for the Financial Times.