The light streaming through the window is murky. The room is inhabited but looks as if it should really be covered in dust sheets. The piano music is plangent and mournful. The heretical thought flits across my mind that Ingmar Bergman's production of Ibsen's play of family secrets and lies is going to be very slow and very meaningful.
Ibsen described his 1881 play as "the future". But his future is now our theatrical past, and it requires more than slipping a few "fucks" into the script as Bergman does here reveal it as more than a familiar museum piece. So often classic theatre just means cosy theatre.
As a piece of theatre staging Bergman's production, with its revolve that moves the family furniture around so zippily that you fear the Alving household is infected not by ghosts but an extremely troublesome poltergeist, is sometimes clumsy.
It feels as if he is struggling to capture some of the fluidity of film on stage but doesn't have the tools at his disposal.
Only when Mrs Alving glimpses past and present in one dreadful vision of Osvald and Regina coupling does the evening bring a shiver down the spine.
The beauty of this production is not so much in its overall concept as in its psychological detail. It peers into the unquiet souls of the living and ruthlessly lays bare their lies and self-deceptions. At the end Osvald - upon whom the sins of the previous generation have come to rest - is as helpless and naked as a baby.
Before, he stalks the play like the living dead, his face whey-white, a gash of red on his head. It is as if he has been covered by a fine coating of dust.
The dust comes off as the lies are stripped away. The sun comes and chases away the ghosts. But not before everyone has been confronted with truths they would rather not face.
There are no innocents here. Angela Kouvacs as Regina captures all the self-consciousness of the sexually ripe young woman who cannot stop touching herself and calculating the effect she is having on others. Orjan Ramberg as Jacob Engstrand, the man Regina has been brought up to believe is her father, is a comic trickster, but no less ruthless for being funny.
But is in the relationship between Pernilla August's superb Mrs Alving and Jan Malmsjo's Pastor Manders that the play really comes alive. Here we have two people who have destroyed themselves by choosing duty over love. The damage cannot be undone.
As the sun comes up on the bleakest of scenes, Mrs Alving stands over her wretched son like a statue made of stone. Her face is cracked.
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