Creditors, Donmar Warehouse, London

With the world economy reeling as a result of sub-prime mortgages and bad debts, now might seem an almost absurdly opportune moment for the Donmar to revive a masterly drama called Creditors. Of course, these days, a play need only contain a character who has taken out a dodgy loan for some over-eager commentator to declare that there's an uncanny coincidence between the subject matter and the temper of the times. And it's true that there have been one or two recent revivals of classics that are true credit-crunch plays, such as Timon of Athens at the Globe.

But August Strindberg's Creditors is not preoccupied with the financial side of debt. Real and imagined, onstage and offstage, creditors with terrifying demands stalk the dream world of the great Swedish dramatist as the bogeymen who symbolise our dread of facing up to bad debts of the emotional kind. And this proves to be the case in Alan Rickman's splendid revival of this wonderfully taut and savagely witty three-hander.

A painter, who is the ailing second husband of a novelist, comes under the spell of a man who has cause to know a great deal about the novelist – he's her ex-husband. While the woman is away on a trip, Gustav, her incognito former spouse (an excellently calculating yet troubled Owen Teale) achieves a mesmeric hold on Adolph, the current husband, in the seaside hotel where all three chance to be staying. Teale's manner is that of a prosperous analyst who is on a covert mission to madden rather than cure his patient. He goads the invalid to give up his crutches, only so as to have the pleasure of watching him totter, and the splendid Tom Burke as Adolph reacts to the hilariously blatant insinuations (such as the idea that he will have to forswear sex because the wife's demands are driving him to epilepsy) like a bullied, whimpering boy, ineluctably drawn to what he does not want to hear, and worshipfully excruciated by his tormentor. In this opening encounter, they form a grotesquely comic double act.

Strindberg is often accused of being a misogynist, and some of his public pronouncements on the subject of women do not make one frantic to revise that reputation. These statements are echoed in the speeches of Gustav. In the rhythmic stealth of David Greig's superb translation, he argues that a female is just "a fat boy with overdeveloped breasts ... a chronic anaemic who haemorrhages regularly 13 times a year. What do you expect to come out of them? Wit?". Is the play, therefore, misogynist? No. One might invoke here D H Lawrence, a writer who had certain affinities with Strindberg. He urged us always to trust the tale, rather than the teller. And as Rickman's production reveals with brilliantly baleful humour, this play is a tragicomic joke on all three of the participants.

Yes, Anna Chancellor's terrific, high-handed Tekla is no better than she should be. She wants her husband to be just one sexually playful "brother" among other toy boys, and her impresario, yet berates him for not being man enough and for taking too much credit for her novels. Confronted with the naked, crotch-splaying sculpture he has made of her, she retaliates by adopting other provocative poses.

The men, though, are worse – particularly Gustav. Tekla is unanswerable when she defiantly flings back at her first husband his own logical inconsistencies. If he doesn't believe in guilt, by what right does he presume to punish her? Forced to admit that this experiment in revenge has not been conducted in the interests of justice, but for the sake of the kick he vainly thought it would give him, Teale's Gustav is left looking like a sweating, red-faced and blustering emblem of male impotence.

At the start, he is seen winding up the blinds on the slanting overhead windows that shed a chalky white light on the bleached hotel room. But Strindberg's drama is not to be confused with the drama of which Gustav has elected himself the stage-manager.

A marvellous evening, this revival of Strindberg's Creditors leaves us with yet another debt of gratitude to Michael Grandage's Donmar.

To 15 November (0870 060 6624)