All the tawdry dazzle of London's most famous shopping district glitters in the third play by the sharp-eyed young talent Levi David Addai. Dawn Walton's exuberant production, cleverly designed by Soutra Gilmour, thrusts the audience into a busy shop in the run-up to Christmas. Perched among the actors on stools or plastic chairs, we watch as Addai and Walton strip away retail's seductive illusion of bounteous luxury, exposing the irony of its maintenance by underpaid workers with dreams of their own.

Addai laces the concept with the pungent flavours of capital life, from the wages gap to the debt mountain to racial, religious and cultural diversity. He also returns to themes familiar from previous work, of edgy South London street life, family and masculine identity. The results are short on structure, but play and production fizz with passion and authenticity, keeping the viewer's nose pressed up against the gleaming plate-glass of this window on to urban existence.

Kofi is university educated but has drifted into his part-time “loss prevention officer” job at Total Sports. Darrell, his former schoolmate ostensibly looking for temporary work to boost his festive finances, has gang connections and two children with different “baby mamas”. Their full-time security colleagues, the bad-tempered Pole Alek and fatherly Ghanaian Emmanuel, assume a seniority in the store's hierarchy beneath the white Essex girl Steph, the manager who, like so many workplace Little Napoleons, relishes her petty power, but secretly longs to be liked.

Out on the shop floor, it's down to Loraina, a Brazilian-born performing-arts student, and Husnad, an Asian prospective economics undergraduate, to deal with demanding customers who, regardless of income, all share an overweening sense of entitlement. With the arrival of two light- fingered boys who excuse their bad behaviour with overblown accounts of hard times in the 'hood, Addai punctures glamorised ghetto mythology with delicious wit. His concern about youth violence and for his characters - in particular the conflicted, rudderless Kofi - is evident, but so, too, is a refreshing and irrepressible faith in humanity.

His optimism is infectious, and the acting, from a cast led by Nathaniel Martello-White as Kofi and the former So Solid Crew member Ashley Walters as Darrell, is terrific. This is a joyous hymn to our flawed, fabulous city.

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