The Pulverised, Arcola Theatre, Changing Face and York Theatre Royal, at The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk THE Pulverised is a story rooted in the spread of globalisation, but it is much more personal than that most impersonal word.

Rebecca Boey plays a factory worker in Shanghai, China; Solomon Isreal, a call centre team leader in Dakar, Senegal; Kate Miles, a research and development engineer in Bucharest, Romania, and Richard Corgan, a quality assurance of subcontractors manager in Lyon, France. If you are scratching your head at what that last job might entail, Corgan's character is struggling to work out where he is waking up each day.

What links these four disparate, desperate lives is that they are all cogs in the wheel of a multinational company, as anonymous as their lack of character names would suggest, each struggling for a sense of identity and individuality.

Their story is told by Alexandra Badea, a French-Romanian writer whose original work won the Grand Prix de la Literature for its premiere at the Strasbourg National Theatre. Andy Sava, a Romanian director who trained at York Theatre Royal, has a passion for European theatre, a passion shared with Royal Shakespeare Company actress Lucy Phelps, and after their paths crossed at the Theatre Royal, they set about bringing the play to the British stage. Sava directs the Arcola, Changing Face and Theatre Royal co-production, Phelps has written her first ever translation, and both have done a tremendous job.

The four characters occupy their own worlds, yet they are always together on Nicolai Hart-Hansen's stage, where each rises in turn from the soil, relates a vignette, and falls to the earth once more, exasperated, enervated, flat out, only to struggle to their feet again, talk and collapse, crumble or drop like a narcoleptic, as if on a loop.

Video imagery adds to the clutter of overbearing lives. This is indeed a pulverising experience, exhaustion writ large across the cast's body language over the unbroken 90-minute arc of Sava's production, but it is not exhausting for audience members, who will empathise with each worker's desire to escape the rat race, break through boundaries and discover new life. Yet modern life in a warren or on a treadmill is riddled with frustrations, fears and awful consequences: whether fighting with the satnav, being told to work overtime for no pay, swimming against the tide on the Senegalese seas or being away from home so often that the bond with your young son frays and fails.

From Orwell's 1984 to The Prisoner, E M Forster's The Machine Stops to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, the individual struggle against "the system" has long been the stuff of literature, the stage and the screen. The Pulverised is a fiercely intelligent addition with a 21st century perspective that will resonate with any office drone.

The Pulverised, Arcola Theatre, Changing Face and York Theatre Royal, at The Studio, York Theatre Royal, until Saturday. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk