When Lucy Prebble tackled financial fraud and the collapse of Enron in her eponymous award-winning 2009 play, she created a modern classic by dramatising an incident that had heralded the worldwide crash to come. Now the playwright is taking on an arguably still more treacherous story, with wider global implications: the killing of Alexander Litvinenko.

This week the Old Vic in London will announce the world premiere of Prebble’s stage version of an acclaimed book about the extraordinary assassination in 2006.

Litvinenko, a former Russian secret service officer who was living with his wife and young son in Muswell Hill, north London, was mysteriously poisoned with the invisible radioactive isotope polonium-210. He now lies buried in a lead coffin in nearby Highgate cemetery, while the two men revealed at an inquiry to have killed him, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, are feted in Putin’s Russia.

Prebble, 37, told the Observer her play would be “a heartfelt piece” that looks at the very nature of storytelling and attempts to find out the truth, as well as exploring the growing threat to opponents of the Russian regime.

“Of course there is all the lurid Bondesque excitement of spies and political corruption and bumbling, strip club-obsessed assassins, but there is also a beautiful quest for truth at its centre, as a good man knowing he is certain to die tries to solve his own murder in that time,” said Prebble. “There are also the tawdry details of where private intelligence meets government – surprisingly, more likely to be in a run-down Waterstones cafe or outside Nike than an oak-panelled members’ club.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Playwright Lucy Prebble. Her dramatisation of the murder will be staged next year. Photograph: Rommel Demano/Getty Images

The lethal, and yet often farcical, tale of Litvinenko’s murder was told comprehensively by the Guardian journalist Luke Harding in his 2016 book A Very Expensive Poison, and Prebble’s stage adaptation, due to open at the Old Vic in the autumn of next year, will keep his title.

As Harding has said, it was a phrase used by Kovtun to explain to a friend what he thought he was bringing into Britain.

“On reading Luke’s book I got that tingling, exciting and irritatingly certain feeling that I was absolutely going to have to make a piece of theatre about this story – that it felt like the story of our time,” said Prebble.

After the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury last month and intimations of the dawn of a new cold war era, the topicality of the subject appealed to the Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew Warchus, who commissioned the play. The theatre’s staging will follow Litvinenko’s killers from the salubrious townhouses of London’s Fitzrovia into the brothels of Soho.

“It takes world events but locates them back in 2006, around the earlier examples of Putin’s experiments with international overreach, because we can now see the consequences of government inaction at them and this murder,” said Prebble. “This story has a third act – something sorely missing from our political and emotional landscape today.

“And among all of this there is the hovering presence of a suspicion, a strategy, a leader, an evil ‘behind it all’, or maybe just a conspiracy. How we both fear that and need it.”

Prebble’s first play The Sugar Syndrome won her the George Devine Award in 2003. The Effect, her most recent play, staged at the National Theatre, won the Critics’ Circle Award for best new play. She is also working on a new television series for Billie Piper, who starred in her ITV drama, Secret Diary of a Call Girl.

“Lucy has some stunning and highly theatrical ideas,” said Harding , adding that he is delighted by her reaction to his book. “Her approach is going to be full of both brightness and of the dark. It will not always necessarily be literal. I think there may be the exotic, imaginative flavour of the great Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov in there as well. I think she is being incredibly brave to tell this story at a time when the message Putin wants to send out is ‘keep quiet’.”

For Prebble, the London stage is the right place to present this twisting detective story. “It needs to be big and bold and ungrounded,” she said. “It has to feel like life now. Because the reality is too unreal.”