Everything sucks in the city

This is the Royal Court as you've never seen it before and as you'll never see it again. Conscious that Howard Korder's The Lights is the last play to be staged here before the theatre closes for renovation, director Ian Rickson alters your bearings on the place so as to give you a sharper sense of a ghost-haunted building caught between its past and its future.

Reversing the normal geography, the audience is positioned on stage while the actors perform the piece on all the different levels of the auditorium. The calculated clash between the faded charm of the Court's fittings and the glass-walled modernity of Jeremy Herbert's installation-like set creates the weird sensation that this both is and isn't the view that Olivier et al saw from up here. And when, towards the end of the play, two characters start smashing up the back wall of the stalls with crowbars, fiction blurs potently with forthcoming reality.

Restlessly shifting from the top of skyscraper, say, to the depths of a dead-end hotel, Korder's kaleidoscopic drama benefits greatly from the multi-level staging. A caustic look at the alienation and despair bred by urban life, it takes place in "a large city" that has the distinct whiff of New York. How, it asks, can you retain any sense of human connectedness in a world that trains you routinely to ignore the supplications of the poor on the streets and to avoid even looking at anyone on public transport as a chance glance may be interpreted as an invitation to violence. Survival means cynicism: as one girls tells a newcomer, the city pledge of allegiance is "Nothing matters and everything sucks".

The play follows the journeys of Emily Mortimer's sensitive waif-thin Lilian, a young shop assistant from out of town, and her jobless boyfriend, Frederic (Lee Ross). During a night out with her fast-talking colleague Rose (excellent Deirdre Harrison), Lilian is picked up by a city official and given a bitter lesson in the need to get tough. Meanwhile, Frederic spirals downwards through a brutal brush with a loan shark and an underpaid stint with a demolition gang, only to be disowned at the end by the now hardened Lilian.

Korder is sharp about how city life erodes the feeling that our actions have effects on others. Lilian steals a watch at work, an action she intuitively knows is on a continuum with the corruption she hears about from the city official who is in the pay of a local construction firm proprietor. As this latter, Colin Stinton turns in a hilarious portrait of a blubbery businessman whose response to any obstacle is to wave a wad of dollars at it and whose determination to party verges on the desperate. The play never builds into an all-out attack on capitalism, however: indeed, its pessimism suggests that there are social ills beyond the reach of political remedy. "Whatever you give the poor, they destroy it. They can't help it."

Much of this is familiar material but Korder gives it fresh comic life. Take the film buff jostling in the mob at a premiere. He's spotted, he says, a pattern in movie crowd scenes: there's all this talking about him. Who says paranoia can't be positive?

n At the Royal Court, London SW1 to Aug 17. Booking: 0171-730 2554