FIRST it was a book, then a hit TV series. Now McMafia – journalist Misha Glenny’s eye-popping look at transnational organised crime – is coming to the Fringe in the form of a stage show which updates the story and, Glenny hopes, acts as a sort of call to arms.

In some ways it also brings the 60-year-old full circle. Before he became an award-winning journalist covering war and political upheaval across several continents, he trained as an actor.

An eye witness to the revolutions in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s and the Balkans wars of the early 1990s, Glenny has watched closely in the decades since as weak political systems have fused with what he calls “unbridled financial capitalism” and organised criminal networks. His contention is that this has created a corrosive soup of manipulation and corruption which now extends even to the White House. It has made London one of the money-laundering capitals of the world, compromised democracies and political systems and, by enriching the so-called “one per cent” who own much of the world’s wealth, fuelled global inequality.

Much of this Glenny has detailed in non-fiction books, most notably McMafia, published in 2008 and turned into a glossy, globe-spanning BBC drama earlier this year. It starred James Norton as the London-based, public school-educated son of a former Russian mafia boss who is dragged into his father’s old world where he becomes a money-launderer for a Russian-Israeli businessman – with deadly consequences. A second series has already been commissioned.

For his Fringe show, Glenny brings the story back into the realm of fact and updates it for the era of Brexit, Trump, Bitcoin and the dark web.

“What I do with the theatre show is something rather different [from the TV series],” he explains. “I use organised crime and the history of it since the late 1980s as a vehicle for explaining, in as theatrical a way as possible, exactly why things have got as bad as they have in the last 30 years.

“It’s fundamentally about organised crime but also asking the question, ‘How the hell did we get here and what are we going to do about it?’ So it’s a different thing to the other two iterations of McMafia.”

So how bad are things? Pretty bad. “I cannot recall as bleak a time as we are experiencing at the moment,” he says. To his mind, the West is currently in a state of “extreme political chaos and considerable political danger”, a result of the corporatisation of transnational criminal gangs and the collusion between them, business people, lawyers, and politicians. He sees trouble and potential conflict brewing in Brazil, South Africa, Turkey and many other places.

Over the course of an hour he’ll run through this shadowy world of oligarchs, criminals, dark web users, money launderers, property magnates, lawyers, hedge-fund managers, cartel bosses and politicians – expect two, in particular, to feature: Donald J Trump and Vladimir Putin – and lay out the affect their interactions are having on democracy and the rule of law.

It is a story which takes in the Conservative Party, recipient of considerable amounts of Russian money, New Labour (thanks to Gordon Brown’s famous “light touch” approach to financial regulation) and even the Scottish Government, whose Scottish Limited Partnerships scheme has been used to launder money.

On the subject of Trump, how much trouble does Glenny think the US President is in, given the pervasive and persistent stories about his connection to Russia and the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 American election?

“The thing about Trump is that he is dependent financially on Russian money and in many ways that explains a lot of what’s going on in the US,” he says. “But the reason why I think Trump is really fundamentally frightened of Mueller is that his speciality when he came up through the Department of Justice was in anti-money laundering.”

Glenny sees in Mueller a man with an unblemished record and a forensic approach to detail, particularly when it comes to following money trails. “Trump’s great vulnerability is that he has been bankrupted so many times and bailed out so many times and those bailouts appear to have come through a variety of conduits, including Russian conduits. This, I think, is where Mueller is going to be focusing rather than the political collusion.”

Glenny’s stage show isn’t entirely pessimistic, however. “Although there are many negative forces which have now penetrated right up to the most powerful political office in the world, there are also a lot of people who are beginning to recognise what the dynamics behind this are, and that corruption and the one per cent – and their collaboration with corrupt and criminal regimes around the world – is a fundamental problem that has to be addressed.”

But if Glenny sees his Fringe show as a call to arms, he doesn’t mean it literally – “having witnessed quite a lot of bloodshed at different times in conflicts around the world, whether it’s the consequences of the war on drugs in Brazil or the breakup of Yugoslavia, I don’t think that violence is a terribly helpful response”.

Instead, it’s an exhortation – a call to stand up and resist in any way we can. “The game isn’t over yet,” he says. “The game is on. It’s not yet lost.”

That’s supposed to cheer us up, by the way.

McMafia: The Theatre Show – Seriously Organised Crime is at Assembly Checkpoint, Bristo Place, Edinburgh, August 20-26.