"This world is a piece of shit. It is a shit house", says Edmond, the 37-year-old title character of David Mamet's pungent snapshot of urban alienation that follows him on an odyssey of self-destruction as he takes flight from his wife and his life.

After the West End's recent revival of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet's frontline report on the yawning gulf between male sexual fantasy and reality in a production that was full of artificial star posturing, this similarly brief play (it runs for just 70 grim but gripping minutes) resonates far more powerfully around a central performance by Kenneth Branagh in the title role that's as gruelling to watch as it is vividly inhabited.

Making his National Theatre debut in his first London stage appearance for over a decade - though he played Richard III in Sheffield last year - Branagh gives (and shows) his all. But it's the emotional nakedness he reveals in the character, as opposed to the full-frontal physical one, that's shocking here.

We follow Edmond's harrowing journey, from peepshows to pawnshops, and watch him being robbed by pimps, prostitutes and cardsharps. But it's when he seeks to reclaim his humanity by striking up a conversation with a woman on the subway, or a waitress he meets in a coffeehouse, that his rage is fatally ignited.

Branagh is superb at registering the faltering contradictions of a character who, out of a fury that leads to devastating consequences, finally finds a kind of peace, even redemption, in the darkest of places.

Edward Hall's galvanising but unnecessarily over-populated production (it employs 20 actors, whereas the original Chicago production in 1982 had half that number for the play's 30 characters) is played out on the forestage of the Olivier in Michael Pavelka's design that cleverly mirrors the concrete of the theatre itself. The 23 short, sharp scenes of Mamet's play are given an intimacy and urgency that's both unsettling and unforgettable.

- Mark Shenton