Festen, Almeida Theatre, London

The sound of a gushing tap and the escalation of a girl's laughter into something more disturbing haunt this phenomenal stage version of the Dogme film, Festen. The movie is a work of genius that tackles the long-term consequences of child abuse, somehow managing to get the best of both film and theatre onto hand-held camera footage of exceptional flair.

I am a huge fan of the people who have created this theatrical adaptation - the playwright David Eldridge, director Rufus Norris, designer Ian MacNeil and Paul Arditti who, if there were awards for soundscape work, would scoop the lot for his superb underscoring of this piece. But I did not believe that they could come up with a stage version that stands comparison with the film on its own terms.

This Festen is an embodiment of what theatre should be, and contained sections that left me thinking I was hallucinating. Thank goodness the interval arrived so that I could check with friends that it wasn't just me having a funny turn. They corroborated every syllable of my babbling. The production feels like primary experience rather than theatre - unlike the Polish stage version of the film that visited London two years ago, which oppressively hammered home the material's similarities with Hamlet.

The story centres on the sixtieth birthday celebrations of a moneyed restaurateur. His family assembles - including his son Christian, whom he repeatedly raped, along with his twin sister, when they were children. The daughter has recently committed suicide. The ting-a-ling of a spoon tapped against a glass is another chilling sound in this work, as Christian uses the toast to his father an opportunity for public accusation.

Hamlet references are inevitably knocking around in this version as well, but Jonny Lee Miller's heart-stopping performance as the whistleblowing hero achieves greatness because it's as if someone had wandered into the proceedings from real life. The effect of such an atrocity - making you in a curious way astonishingly detached yet emotionally dependent on the abuser - reverberates in every atom of his, and I mean this as a serious compliment, modest performance.

T S Eliot once observed that for a drama to have wit, it must acknowledge that there are alternative ways of viewing any situation. This production does so with an understated insight that takes the breath away. You see it in the streaks of wild silliness that break and intensify the tension of the long, beautifully paced banquet scenes.

I am proud to have been on the Evening Standard drama awards panel that gave Norris the Outstanding Newcomer Award a couple of years ago, and that gave the same prize to Tom Hardy last year. Here, as the brother who was not raped but sent away to school, he manages to exude sex appeal and a dangerous unpredictability. Utterly essential viewing.

To 1 May (020-7359 4404)