The poster image of actress Kate Dickie's shaved head inscribed with the word "revenge" announces that this is going to be Sophocles with attitude. Glasgow's Theatre Cryptic has seized the 2,400-year-old play by the throat and saturated it with all the resources of multi-media performance practice. The result is compelling.

The drama of the grief-stricken daughter of Agamemnon who awaits the arrival of her brother Orestes to avenge the murder of her father by her mother, Clytemnestra, is ruthlessly pared down in Clare Venables's adaptation. The essence of the narrative remains, expressed in blunt, urgent language.

Kate Dickie is commanding as Electra, while Steven Beard and Eurudike de Beul (an opera singer) play all the other characters, using a variety of distancing techniques such as exaggerated mannerisms and accents.

De Beul's risky portrayal of Cytemnestra as an eye-rolling, gagging vampire who lapses into disconcerting recitative is deliberately jarring but only intermittently effective. Matt Johnson's setting has diagonal mirrored walls and revolving golden orbs, a layered soundscape which incorporates the Chorus as disembodied voices, and a video image of Orestes's spectacled face reflected in the mirror. This creates subtly resonant imagery, with the exception of the use of video to show the off-stage murder of Cytemnestra, which seems unnecessarily literal and obvious.

Overall, however, this is a successful, confident transposition. While the script strips Sophocles's tragedy of its historical and cultural contexts, the production reconstitutes it as a richly textured and moving performance, which uses technical complexity to communicate simply and universally.

Tours to An Grianan, Letterkenny on Thursday (074-20777) and Town Hall Theatre, Galway on Friday and Saturday (091-569777) as part of the Fresh From Britain mini-season