A young couple with a baby survey their new home. The woman isn’t impressed; she likes the high ceilings and period floor tiles but hates the ugly fireplace. Yet this isn’t some run-down detached gem in need only of loving restoration to turn it into a dream abode. It’s the derelict waiting room of a disused railway station — and with nowhere else to go, the destitute pair are so desperate that they will kill to defend it.

Kay Adshead’s grimly ironic play is a fierce denunciation of boom-time property porn. It’s one of ten short, sharp responses to the current financial crisis that collectively blaze with anger, buzz with wit and crackle with acute anxiety. Not all are politically or dramatically sophisticated, but in Lisa Goldman and Esther Richardson’s stripped-down staging they are vital, and the best are thrillingly inventive.

Oladipo Agboluaje raises questions of cultural and economic exploitation with a black comedy, in which a young British film-maker flounders in Nollywood. In House of Knives, Marisa Carnesky offers a nightmarish fairytale involving the incarceration of one brave audience member in a doll’s house that is then skewered with knives, each representing a personal-finance worry. Most striking of all is Megan Barker’s Anaphylactic, a wildly imaginative, gorgeously lyrical story of a woman’s suicidal despair, juxtaposed with the environmentally disastrous decline of the honey bee. Imagining herself as a contestant on the greed-fuelled gameshow Deal or No Deal, she opens a box, only to release a swarm of stinging insects; her hallucinations accelerating, she believes she is a Queen Bee and prepares to take ecstatic flight from the window of the high-rise flat in which she can no longer afford to live.

There are satirical songs sung by pompous bankers, and a slice of gritty urban rap poetry. But what emerges most powerfully is a sense of how hardship and the loss of livelihood dehumanise, stripping individuals of their dignity, from the expendable car-plant workers in Paula B. Stanic’s piece to Ron McCants’s embittered former mineworkers of Nowheresville, USA. The performers, particularly Jimmy Akingbola and Lara Pulver, are cracking; and the writing is raw, rage-filled and compassionate. So much soaring, if scattergun, talent is, even in these doom-laden days, cause for optimism.

Box office: 020-7478 0100, to July 4

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