Rupert Goold, who directed the Macbeth of my dreams and nightmares last year at the Minerva, now works his illuminating magic upon Luigi Pirandello's intimidatingly cerebral Six Characters in Search of an Author.

He has restored a long-lost element of sexual horror, the element which traps the six characters of the title in perpetual grief and guilt. The climactic brothel scene in which Denise Gough's fine, smouldering Stepdaughter is abused by Ian McDiarmid's oddly composed, far from guilt-laden Father becomes a stylised ritual of sexual submission and grotesquerie into which Eleanor David's anguished Mother intrudes.

The almost operatic outburst into which this trio burst, accompanied by Adam Cork's disturbing music, quite chills the blood. Yet what we saw last night, described as a "new version" by Goold and Ben Power, would be more honestly described as a free adaptation.

In outline it remains faithful to Pirandello's misty blurring of the guide-lines between reality and illusion but the text is stripped down, rewritten, clarified and sexualised.

Goold and Power transform the action, too. A projection screen in an editing studio dominates the stage. And the adaptors dispense with all but two of Pirandello's troupe of rehearsing actors and omnipotent director, into whose midst come those six lost characters in search of someone to put the drama of their wretched family life into play form.

Instead Noma Dumezweni's talkative, documentary Producer busies herself and her crew, compiling a "drama doc" about Dignitas, a Danish organisation that assists the mortally ill to commit suicide. In this neat updating for 2008, the producer's team is artfully intent upon fashioning a drama from the last days of a teenager who has come to die in Denmark. Should the documentary be described as true-tolife or an arty rendition of it?

The film-makers' efforts run in parallel to the activities of Pirandello's actors whose attempts to play The Father, Mother and Stepdaughter are met with laughter and derision. The tragic denouement is then rendered raw, immediate and strange with the drowning of Freya Parker's girl, submerged in a fish tank.

But Goold's wildly self-indulgent and obscure postscript to Pirandello's text dismays. In a simplistic ironic twist Miss Dumezweni's producer is swept into the drama of both the six characters' lives and into her own suicide documentary. A flawed but fascinating occasion.

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