A few days before the first lockdown, Glasgow’s Vanishing Point opened – and quickly closed – an adaptation of Metamorphosis. With its themes of lockdown, isolation and fear of the unknown, it could not have been more prescient.

It would be unreasonable to expect Cardiff’s Hijinx to be as far ahead of the curve with this version of Franz Kafka’s story – and if anything, its Zoom-based antics seem rather 2020. But, in its vision of communication breakdown, atomisation and an indifferent bureaucracy, it has a similar understanding of the tale’s haunting power.

Not that “haunting” is the word you’d use to describe Ben Pettitt-Wade’s production. Streamed live with optional audience interaction, it is predominantly playful and funny. It also has a healthy irreverence for realism. Actors appear in bad wigs and false beards, a guru offers dodgy spiritual advice from a bathtub, and Gregor Samsa, the downtrodden worker who finds himself morphing into an insect, is played by someone new every time.

It’s a good laugh, but there’s a purpose behind it too. Shown as part of Summerhall’s Edinburgh fringe programme, this Metamorphosis repeatedly asks us to put ourselves in Gregor’s shoes. Haven’t we all, like him, been made to feel excluded when the technology won’t let us log on? Haven’t we all suffered unstable wifi connections that are the equivalent, in our digital world, of an unstable body? And if we did wake up, transformed like Gregor, what would we do? (We get an online poll to answer that.)

The clash of comedy and terror – one minute a series of amusingly over-the-top auditions for the key roles, the next a flickering reflection of a mutating man – reminds us of the fragile balance between order and chaos.

• Available online until 29 August.