The Arts Council deserves nothing but contempt and mockery for its philistine plan to withdraw nearly half of its annual subsidy to this prime centre for new writing. It is a disastrous proposal that defies sense and outrages sensibility.

Keyed up by its new artistic director, Josie Rourke, the Bush has begun to broaden the scope of its repertoire. And the London premiere of this frightening double-bill by American playwright Neil LaBute serves robust notice of Miss Rourke's expansionist programme and its political slanting.

LaBute likes to shock audiences by bringing his plays to their climactic point with outbursts of violence, whether of the physical or cerebral kind. His double bill, Land of the Dead (2002) and Helter Skelter (2007), though a mere 65 minutes long and not ranking with his best work, resorts to the same scary tactics. It tries to disturb our complacent reaction to the world's atrocities by demonstrating that we may at any time be caught up in violence.

Both plays centre upon mobile phones and pregnancy, a pregnancy that is casually aborted in the first case and in the second - well, it would spoil the impact of Helter Skelter's coup de théâtre to reveal more. Land of the Dead is heralded and adorned with Nikola Kodjabashia's creepy flickers of music. It runs in the parallel streams of domestic, personal consciousness of a youngish New York husband and wife on a horrific but unnamed day that you soon intuit will turn out to be 9/11. The husband's callous observations about his wife's abortion, capped by a mobile message offering her the chance to keep "the thing," become his ghostly last words before the Twin Towers fall.

Helter Skelter, set at the swish table of a smart New York restaurant, places Patrick Driver's middle-aged husband and his highly pregnant wife at sudden, embarrassed odds when she makes him aware of her discovery of his long affair with her sister.

The marital fracas strikes far too familiar, recriminating notes. Driver runs the gamut of clichéd, self-forgiving emotions, while Ruth Gemmell, who plays the woman in both plays, keeps her scathing, derisive cool as she takes a self-destructive form of revenge in Patricia Benecke's far too restrained production. LaBute brings a chilling touch of classic Greek tragedy to our own times.

• Until 18 February (020 7610 4224).