It is almost impossible to recommend the late Sarah Kane's brutal play. To do so would be to condemn someone to an evening of the most disturbing depravity that contains scene after scene of torture and atrocity. The setting is a place described in Kane's 1998 script as a university, though in Katie Mitchell's minutely detailed and unflinching production it could be any decaying institution.

Here, the person with the most authority is a man called Tinker (Tom Mothersdale) who, although he has the power to inflict the most unimaginable pain, and often does, is himself, we eventually infer, the pawn and ultimately victim of a regime.

In terms of plot, there is just this place and the things that happen within its decaying walls of peeling paint. Torture sessions are heralded with a bone-chilling klaxon. The tools are brought on at the double by Tinker's minions and used just as unhesitatingly. Everything that happens here is done purposefully by perpetrators, though for everyone else the reasoning is fathomless. There are moments of tenderness, too, so in that sense the play depicts the full spectrum of human behaviour.

Why watch it? Well, Kane was clearly thinking about the time in which she lived when she wrote it (she killed herself not long after).

But in an age in which atrocity can be tweeted, and the cruelty of Isis and the calculated torment dished out at Guantanamo have become a kind of norm, this play feels utterly now and of our time.

That's why.