If ever there was a work suited to the theatre director Katie Mitchell's distinctive style of radical reinterpretation it is Virginia Woolf's The Waves.

Woolf's experimental novel from 1931 divided critics from the start as to whether it was even a novel with its series of confessional monologues unfolding the lives of six characters from childhood to later life.

And it was no surprise when - on first viewing two years ago - Mitchell's astonishing stage adaptation did likewise.

The Financial Times's critic loved it, describing it as "the most poetically imaginative staging that London has seen in many months". But The Guardian's loathed the work. "There seems to me something extravagantly pointless about trying to give Woolf's words a physical reality," Michael Billington wrote. "At times, you feel you are watching a very bad radio play."

What Mitchell does, with deft choreography, is create a multimedia-performance in which actors read/recite from Woolf's text while others bring the sound to life (often with the kind of stamping on a tray of gravel effect that obviously irritated some). Others move lights and cameras to capture the characters in atmospheric chiaroscuro that is filmed and projected onto a screen behind.

The style is one with which Mitchell has persisted, though, to my mind, ... some trace of her, her adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (also currently in repertory at the Cottesloe) is less successful by far.

There can be a sense of the process being more important than the production, hence the accusations of sterility. But with Waves, the live video presentation captures something of what is both magical and infuriating in Woolf's original.

Mitchell is reuniting her 2006 cast, including Kate Duchêne and Anastasia Hille, for this second National Theatre run, starting tonight, prior to a Broadway transfer. Prepare to be baffled - and dazzled.

Waves is in repertory until 9 September. Box office: 020 7452 3000; www.nationaltheatre.org.uk