Conall Morrison's new adaptation sets Ibsen's 1881 drama in Northern Ireland during the same era: Mrs Alving becomes Mrs Irving, Engstrand becomes Armstrong and Morrison has rewritten the dialogue in the recognisable local idiom.
While the lines themselves sound credible, his point in making the transposition to this era and place remains unclear. We learn that Northern Irish society of that time was restrictive, convention-bound and hypocritical, and with our contemporary perspective we can remark on how little things have changed. Subjects that were hugely controversial in Ibsen's time - incest, venereal disease - retain their power to shock, and there is much that remains recognisable in this portrait of a conservative, religious society whose people fear exposure. But surely this is true of many contemporary cultures: do audiences really need the play transplanted to their own back yard to grasp the parallel?
There are local resonances in the play's depiction of a people plagued by spectres of ancestral wrongdoing and doomed to repeat the past, but is Morrison saying that the roots of the area's conflicts lie in its Victorian repressions? A seriously undercooked production, directed by Morrison, exacerbates the lack of clarity.
Acting styles and abilities are all over the map, and relationships lack depth. Stella McCusker plays Mrs Irving in full melodramatic display, but there is no sense of history or subtext in her interchanges with Sandy Neilson's rigid Reverend Webster, nor a jot of subtlety in her lusty pawing of her son Oswald (Damian O'Hare, trying hard at something naturalistic). We understand little of Armstrong's craftiness in Walter McMonagle's shouty performance, and Lesley-Ann Shaw doesn't make much sense of Regina's conflicting desires and ambitions.
On opening night, awkward emotional moments provoked nervous tittering, and after their titanically overwrought act three truth-telling scene, Mrs Irving's inexplicable query to Oswald - "Has all of this disturbed you?" - generated an all-out belly laugh. Sabine Dargent's conservatory set is beautiful, but the drama that it contains sadly fails to convince.
· Until October 11. Box office: 028-9038 1081.
