Gyrating rock gymnastics or traditional tarantella? You can take your pick with Thomas Ostermeier and Rachel Kavanaugh's contrasting productions of Ibsen's 1879 play. They are as different from each other as chalk and cheese. Or perhaps as different as a 21st-century European wildchild and a young 19th-century matron.
At the Barbican, Thomas Ostermeier's updated version (in German) is a mixture of the compelling, the preposterous and the irritating. But even at its most ludicrous, you have to admit that it's not often you leave the theatre after seeing a century-old play seething with the same intensity and excitement that audiences must have felt when it was first staged. Alongside it, Kavanaugh's production seems tame and sedate, despite a lovely new adaptation by Bryony Lavery that lets the light and air into the text.
Ostermeier transposes Torvald and Nora Helmer's social milieu to the prosperous metropolitan middle classes to be found in any European capital city. They have huge white-leather sofas, a wall-to-wall aquarium of tropical fish, gizmos and gadgets, three gorgeous trophy children, and an au pair to keep them out of sight and out of mind. Clearly, Torvald hasn't just been appointed manager of the Tunbridge Wells branch of Barclays. He is a big fish, at work and home, and he is about to get his chips.
This concept of the play is immediately appealing, but it is not long into the production before the audience is called upon to bridge a major credibility gap. Are we really supposed to believe that in this day and age Nora would be so beholden to her husband, rather than out there running her own business or earning six-digit bonuses in the City? That Torvald values his "honour" above all else? That in a world where fraud and double dealing can bring celebrity status, Krogstad would be viewed with such opprobrium?
From the way that the Aids-suffering Dr Rank and Torvald go on about Krogstad's moral perversion, you would think that he had been caught creating child pornography at the very least, rather than committing forgery. The morals and values of 19th-century Norway fit uneasily in this bright shiny world of conspicuous consumption.
Retaining the 19th-century setting raises no such difficulties in Birmingham, but Kavanaugh's production has its own problems: it is dusty and tightly laced right down to its acceptance of three-act, two-interval tradition. When the acting isn't just dull, it is in the bosom-heaving Victorian style, particularly in the final confrontation between Tara Fitzgerald's Nora and Tom Goodman-Hill's Torvald, the latter throwing his arms around like the villain in a bad melodrama.
If Nora in Kavanaugh's production is a precious china child-doll in servitude to the misguided paternalism of Torvald, in Ostermeier's version she is Barbie-cum-Lara Croft in bondage to the sexual demands of her husband. Under the circumstances, her final bid for freedom - leaving a trail of blood behind her - makes some sense, although it is hard to see in this frail, forlorn figure sitting alone on the doorstep anything other than the spectre of defeat and the prospect of a long stretch in another kind of prison.
In the end the fundamental difference between these productions lies less in shifts of century or the social or psychological positionings and motivations of the characters, and more in the aesthetics. At Birmingham you have a well-bred, very English approach to Ibsen; at the Barbican, you get something raucous, sweaty and physical - with, sometimes, all the ugliness of a car smash. German theatre's predilection for loud music rather than real emotion is sometimes in evidence, but the dynamic of the relationship between Anne Tismer's edgy Nora, Jorg Hartmann's cool Torvald and Lars Eidinger's Dr Rank - a drunken fallen angel - always has you on the edge of your seat.
· At the Barbican until Sunday. Box office: 0845 1207557. At Birmingham Rep until February 14. Box office: 0121-236 4455. Then touring.
