Women of Troy, National Theatre: Lyttelton, London

Back in 2004, Katie Mitchell directed a savagely acute and apposite production of Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides. It's one of the greatest plays ever written about the murky motivation for going to war. Now, in the same space the wide-framed Lyttelton Theatre at the National Mitchell directs a stunningly imaginative account of the same author's Women of Troy, one of the greatest plays ever written about the pitiless aftermath of war. This production shares certain features with its predecessor not least an updated contemporary setting and a shaming pertinence to Iraq.

In a grim, dimly lit holding room of concrete pillars and corrugated iron walls located by the docks, the Trojan women await shipment to the humiliating futures that have been assigned them. "We are the loot," declares Andromache in Don Taylor's pungent translation. Attired in spangly black or grey ball gowns, the women have been forced to beautify themselves as booty, a necessity that they have turned into a defiant stickling for standards (by re-applying lipstick in compact mirrors etc).

Unfolding as a succession of reminders that you can never say that you suffered the worst, the production dispenses with Euripides' introductory scene, which involves two Gods (Poseidon and Athena) settling their differences in a joint vindictive distaste for the Greeks.

Instead of ironically gesturing to a future world where the fortunes of the victors will fall foul of these deities, Mitchell and her excellent creative team train our attention on the trapped nightmare of the present. With extraordinary daring and coherence, the production weaves between hyper-detailed realism and a dream-like expressionism that releases the contents of the play's subconscious onto the stage.

On the one hand, Sinead Matthews' Cassandra, doomed to be Agamemnon's concubine, plausibly runs amok like a mad arsonist, setting light to her bouquet, stripping off her wedding gown, and croaking an old Carpenters' song as a parody nuptial number.

And there are touches of superb psychological acumen. A sweaty-palmed Menelaus (Stephen Kennedy) will clearly not long be able to keep his paws off his sexy, disgraced wife Helen of Troy, a loathed figure who visibly paces a windowed upper room. So he shrugs off his shame by forcing a contemptuous kiss on the lips of Kate Duchene's splendid, toughly indignant Hecuba, who here looks like a Singer Sargent portrait surreally subject to the extremities of grievance.

At the same time, there are sequences where the women become a dreamy formation ballroom dance team, their lack of partners recalling the South American women who danced with the "disappeared". Mostly, their Pina Bausch-influenced synchronised movement feels psychologically motivated, but occasionally the group and the atmosphere of the production go wildly Awol to a hot jazz beat.

The result, though, is not coolly distancing in the manner of a Brechtian alienation effect. Rather, you are pulled back into the proceedings with all the more raw emotion afterwards. Perhaps a new term is needed for this technique: a re-initiation effect, perhaps?

There's another stupendous interpolated scene where the future-that-might-have-been returns in the ghostly shape of Anastasia Hille's Andromache, bulgingly pregnant with the baby whose corpse has already been brought on in a briefcase by the shifty Greeks (well played by Michael Gould and Jonah Russell).

Now heartbreakingly hypothetical, like piercing nostalgia made phantom flesh, Andromache backs across the stage and exits silently through a side door, while the chorus of women edge in a diagonally opposite direction. Music and movement, text and white noise, the outer and the inner world fuse in constantly surprising and persuasive ways throughout this unforgettable experience.

In rep to 27 February (020-7452 3000)