HEADLONG

Pirandello's 1921 play, in which the six characters of the title invade a rehearsal claiming that they have been discarded by their creator and demanding that the actors resolve their tragic story, is a potent concept but I've yet to see it pulled off on stage. Rupert Goold and Ben Power, who have already combined the Chapman Brothers with 'Dr Faustus', now go even further with a dazzling version of Pirandello's play in which the characters arrive in an editing suite where Noma Dumezweni's producer is struggling to create a documentary out of a terminally ill boy's trip to Denmark to commit suicide. Topically (and there are references to Peter 'A Year with the Queen' Fincham), she and her colleagues are wrestling with trying to create something that is both dramatic and truthful.

It's dizzying stuff and Goold's huge talent as a director is to make ideas sexy. There are moments of tension when you can feel the whole audience holding its breath, most especially when Ian McDiarmid's sinister father transforms his stepdaughter into a Lolita-like sex object. They are interrupted by his ex-wife who unexpectedly bursts into an operatic aria, exposing her emotional pain more effectively than any documentary coul... after the summer doldrums, the autumn season has begun with a bang.

Rupert Goold is a name that will give any project legs at the moment. All the same, you have to admire the steady nerve and the vision of the producers who have brought his and Ben Power's multimedia adaptation of the Pirandello classic, Six Characters in Search of an Author, from Chichester's Minerva Studio to the Gielgud Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. Not since Rufus Norris's brilliant version of Cabaret two years ago has theatreland's commercial sector been treated to such an exhilarating booster jab of radical reinvention and rampant imagination.

Everyone involved in the transfer merits special praise because they have not just preserved the weird, mind-bending intellectual integrity of this fiercely fresh take on the play. With enhanced production values for the live and pre-recorded filmic elements, the show has now expertly heightened the emotional effect of the constant disturbing clashes between different levels of reality and modes of existence.

Is Rupert Goold, now the hottest director on the theatrical block, a maverick genius or a self-indulgent upstart? His staging of Pirandello's best-known play, which I first caught at Chichester in July, more than merits its transfer. I haven't seen a more exhilaratingly imaginative revival of a modern classic since Stephen Daldry raised Priestley's Inspector Calls from the grave.

What also struck me was Goold's ability to get powerful performances from his actors, notably from Gough, whose Stepdaughter exudes smouldering scorn and McDiarmid, who doesn't quite catch the Father's inner guilt but is still an impressively sardonic, sinister figure. In Goold's updating they interrupt the editing of a documentary drama about the assisted suicide of a terminally ill boy in a Danish clinic. That's a conceit which brings with it loads of Pirandellian rumination and reverie. Can life match the concentrated intensity of art or art capture the elusive complexities of life? More specifically, how adequate is modern culture, and especially television, to cope with the demands of reality? Not very, suggests Goold, ending the evening with so many disorientating effects, among them a guest appearance by Pirandello himself, that I was left mentally waving a white flag - while cheering a boldness seldom encountered in the West End.