Hacked, Theatre 503, London

Strictly speaking, you can no more volunteer to have your phone hacked than you can submit to consensual rape. So there is a bit of a contradiction in terms lurking at the heart of Theatre 503's Hacked, an admirably quick-fire response to the phone-hacking scandal. The show consists of six short plays inspired by the intercepted voicemails of willing (and anonymous) members of the public. I must admit that, in prospect, this device struck me as both muddled and gimmicky. But having seen the pieces – all of them sharply performed under individual directors – I find myself applauding the virtues of this deliberately self-implicating method. By forcing the dramatists into the role of eavesdroppers, it seems to have heightened their awareness of what it means to have your privacy violated.

This is best exemplified in Dominic Cavendish's wittily suggestive A View of the Zoo. Twentysomething James (Gary Tushaw) loses his mobile in a London cab. The next day he's being flown club class to the Manhattan penthouse of elderly plutocrat Keith (William Maxwell) who makes a ceremony of returning it. It's an ostensibly delightful situation that turns progressively sinister as the eccentric old cove emerges as a moneyed Mephistophilis who is willing to use James's precious last voicemail from his father as a bargaining counter.

Alert to the regrettably dissolving lines between public and private, the evening includes Dawn King's Dinosaur, a spirited satire on a world that has so abolished modesty with live feeds, twitter et al that political hopefuls have to outdo each other in online sexual revelation, and Ben Ellis's haunting Complete Fiction, in which a troubled, evasive travel journalist longs to lose an identity he is not even sure he possesses.

The link to the current scandal sometimes feels tenuous, but it's salutary that you are constantly aware that real lives have been plundered for these pieces. And it's great that Hacked kicks off with Rewind, a punchy sketch by Matt Hartley which, in effect, confesses to all of the dangers of this theatrical tactic, as two bumptious professional voicemail interceptors congratulate one another on decoding a ball-achingly banal message about a house dispute ("sinister in its normality") as a terrorist threat.

To 4 October (020 7978 7040)