Delirium ** TNT

Enda Walsh’s updated reworking of Dostoevsky’s classic The Brothers Karamazov certainly lives up to its new title with its frantic, overemphatic relentlessness. Even if, like me, you haven’t read the novel, it doesn’t take long to work out the personalities of the three brothers and Fyodor, their dissolute dad, though the servant Smerdyakov (his illegitimate son) proves more difficult to pin down.

The jealous rivalry between Fyodor and Mitya (his profligate, debt-ridden eldest) over cabaret singer Grushenka, and Mitya’s treatment of his fiancée Katerina are clearly expounded, and there’s the occasional arresting moment. For the most part, however, the complex theological and philosophical debates are submerged in Theatre O’s hectic, very physical production which turns a priest into a sock puppet and takes place primarily in a night club.

His style will appeal to some, but for the second time in as many months, I emerged from a Walsh play about a dysfunctional family alienated from the characters, exhausted by the sheer frenzy, and (in this case) feeling as though I’d been repeatedly bludgeoned about the head with the weight - if not the insight - of the 1000 page original.

Pit at the Barbican Silk St, EC2 (020-7638 8891). Until November 22. £12