Small spaces suit Ibsen, and it is fascinating to see this most claustrophobic of plays set, by Lez Brotherston, in what looks like a rotating pinewood cabin. But, much as I admire the confined intensity of Anna Mackmin's production, the candid over-explicitness of Amelia Bullmore's new version seems at odds with Ibsen's intention.
It is an extraordinary play. It touches, among other subjects, on syphilis, prostitution, sibling 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. And the Victorian critics who attacked the play as "an open drain" and "a loathsome sore unbandaged" at least grasped something: that, under the often oblique dialogue, Ibsen was attacking dead, inherited ideas.
Bullmore undermines Ibsen's tactical evasiveness and replaces his stealthy irony with her own. Mrs Alving, who once sought refuge from her dissolute husband with Pastor Manders, here tells the uptight cleric: "I'll never persuade you to spend the night with me, will I?" That knowingness is echoed by Manders who, surveying Mrs Alving's vast heap of books, sardonically asks: "What's your secret? Flower-pressing on an enormous scale?" It's a funny line but contradicts Manders' faint boobyishness and undercuts the point which is his horror at the progressive nature of Mrs Alving's library.
In short, Ibsen's 19th century sensibility has been overlaid by a contemporary one. And, by playing the text straight through without interval, Mackmin doesn't always give the play room to breathe. But what you lose in spaciousness you gain in ferocity and 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.
Finbar Lynch's swart, poker-backed Manders excellently exudes the chill odour of sanctity. Paul Copley, as the blackmailing carpenter Engstrand also pulls off the difficult feat of making the old reprobate superficially plausible. And, in a strong cast, Christian Coulson's Osvald crumbles movingly into inherited decrepitude and Sarah Smart captures his half-sister's provocative sexuality.
The bones of Ibsen's magnificent play are all there. 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.
· Until February 17. Box office: 020-7229 0706
