Small spaces suit Ibsen, and it is fascinating to see this most claustrophobic of plays set in what looks like a rotating pinewood cabin. But much as I admire the confined intensity of Anna Mackmin's production, the candid explicitness of Amelia Bullmore's new version seems at odds with Ibsen's intention.
This is, of course, an extraordinary play. It touches, among other subjects, on syphilis, prostitution, incest, free love and euthanasia. Yet it does this through what an earlier translator, Michael Meyer, called "double-density dialogue", in which characters say one thing while meaning another. Even if we mock the Victorian critics who attacked the play as "an open drain" and "a loathsome sore unbandaged", they at least grasped something: under the often oblique dialogue, Ibsen was attacking dead, inherited ideas.
Bullmore's version replaces his stealthy irony with her own; Ibsen's 19th-century sensibility has been overlaid with a contemporary one. By playing the text straight through without interval, Mackmin doesn't give the play room to breathe. But what you lose in spaciousness you gain in ferocity and, from the first sight of her face pressed up against a rain-spattered window, Niamh Cusack is an outstanding Mrs Alving. For all her stultifying devotion to duty, this is a woman who clearly has an abundant, generous heart. When Cusack tells her son, Osvald, "I love only you," it is with the emotional fervour of someone who has pointlessly sacrificed herself to her husband's fraudulent memory.
Meanwhile, Finbar Lynch's swart, poker-backed Manders exudes the chill odour of sanctity. Paul Copley, as the blackmailing carpenter Engstrand, who is happy to use his supposed daughter as brothel-bait, actually makes the old reprobate superficially plausible. And, in a strong cast, Christian Coulson's Osvald crumbles movingly into inherited decrepitude, while Sarah Smart captures his half-sister's provocative sexuality.
The bones of Ibsen's magnificent play are all there; Neil Austin's lighting design and Olly Fox's plaintive violin theme add to the sense of circumambient gloom. I am puzzled only by the production's declared intention of "stripping the play to its elements". It was Ibsen who divested 19th-century drama of its surplus flesh; and since his play isn't broken, I can't see a need to fix it.
· Until February 17. Box office: 020-7229 0706.
