Star rating: *** This week, Ken Loach's new film, It's a Free World, premiered on terrestrial television. A trademark Loachian account of how migrant workers fare in Britain's black economy, it dealt with remarkably similar themes to Davey Anderson's new play, which opened the night after. This isn't so much coincidence as a reflection of the contemporary toxicity of multicultural Britain beyond its inclusive façade, making such material irresistible to any socially aware dramatist.

Star rating: ***

This week, Ken Loach's new film, It's a Free World, premiered on terrestrial television. A trademark Loachian account of how migrant workers fare in Britain's black economy, it dealt with remarkably similar themes to Davey Anderson's new play, which opened the night after. This isn't so much coincidence as a reflection of the contemporary toxicity of multicultural Britain beyond its inclusive façade, making such material irresistible to any socially aware dramatist.

Anderson, along with his company, has knitted together a complex web of everyday tragedy, in which a construction company manager on the skids becomes complicit with a Polish cleaner in an attempt to supply illegal workers. Throw into the mix a lovesick security guard, a police photographer who gets her close up, a spendthrift wife and a walking Asbo case and the late night at the office the action culminates in is a deadly statement on how capitalism corrupts and destructs.

Yet, like Anderson's debut piece, Snuff, Rupture is darker and more ambiguous than any lazy polemic, exploring ideas of death as pornography and the numbing removal of intimacy when life is seen through a lens. Played on a big stage initially divided into three areas, the thriller-type framing of Anderson's own production for the Traverse in association with the National Theatre of Scotland Workshop leaves some strands frustratingly dangling.

Yet, if desperation fuels both Neil McKinven's Colin and Agnieszska Bresler's Monika, Brian Ferguson's Stewart is even more recognisable. His inappropriate hugs, quiet neediness and unrequited obsession with Monika, or any other woman who enters his sphere beyond TV monitors, taps into an unspoken collective need for human contact beyond economic exchange, depressingly summing up the state we're in.