The news events covered are from 1975, but the tech, the look and above all the feel are unambiguously 2017. Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay (voted one of the ten best in the history of cinema) was a coruscating satire on news, entertainment and civic anger when it was filmed, and adapter Lee Hall has scarcely had to change a word – just trim and re-point the action here and there – to present it as a horrifying prophecy of the new normal. The story of newscaster Howard Beale, who announces his on-air suicide then morphs into a “prophet of the airwaves”, getting caught up in network and financial politics, would hardly make us turn a hair if it were reported in any of the media so skewered by the tale itself.

Director Ivo van Hove’s staging is the most triumphant demonstration I have seen of his concepts of space, multimedia and audience/performance relationships. Forget the ballyhoo about punters seated at dining tables onstage and served real meals during the show; that’s literally a sideshow. Van Hove and designer Jan Versweyfeld have fashioned a multi-area, multi-video-screen, multi-camera playing environment which conveys how events are mediated without alienating us from the live action. At one point, Douglas Henshall and Michelle Dockery as a pair of news executives – Henshall stolid as Beale’s old friend, Dockery enthusiastic as she senses the coming trend – are seen onscreen walking along the South Bank; the camera then appears to follow them onstage, and if that first sequence is pre-recorded, it’s immensely well integrated with live events. In a delicious touch, a row of four men can be seen above the main screen, looking like a hairier version of Kraftwerk; I had assumed that they were vision mixers, but they are in fact the electronic band Blindman, and Kraftwerk numbers from the album The Man Machine punctuate the score.

In the central role of Beale, Bryan Cranston is everything you might expect and hope. He eschews the mad messianics of Peter Finch in the original film in favour of a measured yet passionate mission-to-inform delivery, sometimes from the second row of the audience. We are used to lapping Cranston up on screen, and van Hove’s compelling set-up here gives us that familiar experience plus the added thrill of the man in the flesh. Supporting attractions include a carnivorous Tunji Kasim and an episcopal Richerd Cordery. Dockery is perhaps ill-served by a character who goes all-out for ratings and sexual satisfaction alike without seeing anything behind either, but makes the most of what she is given as a prophet in her own way of reality TV. The only truly dispiriting element is that Beale’s slogan, adopted by millions, of viewers, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!”, is so unchallenging today that it would hardly gain a handful of retweets.

Written for the Financial Times.