Is Rupert Goold, now the hottest director on the theatrical block, a maverick genius or a self-indulgent upstart? His ultra-fussy revival of Macbeth left me taking the more churlish view; but 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.

Yes, Goold and Ben Power's adaptation is clever and sometimes clever-clever, but what struck me on a second viewing was that it fully acknowledged the intellectual author's often underrated capacity for strong feeling. Children die. An old man visits a brothel, where his startlingly ugly encounter with his own stepdaughter is interrupted by her mother, his estranged wife. Seeing Ian McDiarmid about to enter a gaudily prettified Denise Gough from the rear, Eleanor David expresses her horror in operatic chant, as if to prove that extreme emotion instinctively escalates from speech to song.

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. Also from Noma Dumezweni as the character Pirandello called the Producer and is here a much altered figure. In the original she, or rather he, is rehearsing one of the playwright's own pieces when the sextet of the title appear, demanding to be dramatised. 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.

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