Rupert Goold's radical new version of Pirandello's classic is scintillatingly clever. Goold and his fellow adaptor Ben Power have updated the play's pre-occupations with truth, fiction and reality for an audience accustomed to reality TV and docu-drama. In so doing, they ingeniously revive the drama's original shock value and home in on the most urgent ethical issues of the television age.

Here then, the six characters in desperate need of an author to tell their tale do not burst into a play rehearsal, but into the editing suite of a television company. A documentary producer (Noma Dumezweni) is under fire from her sharp-suited executive (John Mackay) because her account of the assisted suicide of a terminally ill teenager is not "edgy" enough. The reality doesn't match his notion of what the reality should be. In Goold and Power's bitingly funny scene, questions about ethics and techniques come thick and fast. And so the atmosphere is already electric with moral confusion when the six characters enter, with their harrowing tale of incest and death, and demand that their story be told with the utmost intensity and integrity.