Pirandello’s spooky, 1920s classic of family trauma and metaphysical shockwaves has been given a seriously thrilling makeover. Premiered at Chichester’s Minerva, Rupert Goold’s enthralling production now fits the proscenium stage like a dream. Six Characters is re‑created and given relevance for a world eager to turn a blind eye to television’s blurring of the lines between reality and illusion.

Goold has charged it with its original existential mystery and visceral excitements. The elements of family break-down,marital collapse and suicide acquire a chilling potency. The crucial scene of incestuous sex is interpreted with a candour forbidden in the age of stage censorship.

The play has been rewritten by Ben Power and Goold, leaving just its framework intact. In the original a theatre rehearsal is interrupted by the six characters whose Author has failed to bring their family narrative to dramatic life. In the Goold-Power version the funereally-dressed sextet, led by Ian McDiarmid’s flamboyant, cane-flourishing Father, intrudes on a film-editing studio in Denmark. Here, Noma Dumezweni’s Producer, two actors and technicians view extracts from the drama documentary they are making about mercy-killing and a terminally-ill 14‑year-old who has chosen to die.

The difficulties facing the film-makers run in satirical, ingenious counterpoint to that of the Six Characters. What is fictitious? What is real? When the Producer has heard the outline of the Six Characters’ life-story, centred upon the Father’s brothel encounter with his estranged Step-Daughter, she agrees to film their story, using her own actors. But Father and Daughter insist upon playing themselves.

Goold stages these scenes of familial disintegration to shocking effect. A procurer leaps from under the brothel bed like some human jack-in-the-box. Denise Gough’s terrific Step-Daughter, a mocking, sexually provocative, lipsticked presence, stripped by McDiarmid’s icily functional Father, dons her Lolita dress and Eleanor David’s outraged Mother bursts in on them. To Adam Cork’s eerie,Berg-like music the trio sing howling, wordless arias of grief and rage.

The sense of this family, doomed for ever to re-enact the tragedy of their lives generates more emotional power than the final images of the Producer who loses her shaky hold on what is described as reality. Even so, an astonishing night.

Until 8 November (0844 482 5130).