Faces in the crowd, Royal Court: Theatre Upstairs, London

Of all the new plays that have opened since the financial turmoil began, Leo Butler's Faces in the Crowd is the closest to a true credit-crunch drama, a bare-knuckle marital slugfest that's a Strindberg or an Albee for the credit-crunch generation. When the row is at its height, there are bitter recriminations about buying with plastic and falling for the have-it-now-pay-later ethos. But, of course, the play deals with the kind of emotional debts that are harder to cope with.

Dave promised Joanne the world, and she got it in expensive consumer goods. The debts built up, the children were postponed through abortion. Ten years ago, Dave buckled under the pressure and abandoned his wife, Sheffield home and financial responsibilities for the lure of London. Now, she has sought him out. The tick of the biological clock is deafening, and it's payback time.

The drama unfolds in Dave's noisy, minimalist Shoreditch flat. For Clare Lizzimore's tense, hard-hitting production, the design by William Fricker and Rae Smith puts the audience in the position of uneasy voyeurs, as though watching animals in a bear pit. We get to pry on all the ignominious juxtapositions – Joanne rifling though Dave's mobile at the lunch bar while Dave is in the loo trying to stiffen his resolve with porn mags.

Amanda Drew and Con O'Neill give fiercely courageous, sometimes literally full-frontal performances as the couple. But there's some contrivance about proceedings, and you are never sufficiently pierced by their back story to care enough about their predicament, though Butler gets some queasy mileage out of Joanne's conflicted aims – to fall pregnant by Dave and to humiliate him.

To 8 November (020-7565 5000)