Photograph: Stephen Vaughan
A portrait of the dead General Gabler stares down from the wall. The drawing room is dark with swagged red velvet and so stuffed with lilies that it resembles a mausoleum. This is a room in which you could suffocate to death, and Hedda, the capricious general's daughter, just back from her continental honeymoon with her mediocre husband, Tessman, knows it will be the death of her. "What can I do to kill time?" she asks in despair. "What can I do?"
Matthew Lloyd's cracking production, in an urgent, deadly funny new version by Mike Poulton, is the best one of this play I've ever seen. Perhaps it lacks real tragedy; certainly Gillian Kearney's Hedda is less caged tiger and more spoiled kitten. But I know this woman. She is the prettiest, bitchiest and most dissatisfied girl in the school, who has turned into the prettiest, bitchiest and most dissatisfied matron on the block. And she is still trying to set her rival's blonde curls alight.
Lloyd and Poulton present Hedda and Tessman as two people who have never really grown up. Tom Smith's pathetically comic Tessman, all arms and legs, is a boy, not a man: when he thinks his professorship is lost, he throws a tantrum like a three-year-old. Hedda is no less immature, but has the added burden of self-knowledge. Tessman is blind to the real state of his marriage, but when Mrs Elvstead talks of her relationship with Ejlert Lovborg and of being "two beings as a single soul", you see the deep well of Hedda's loneliness and bitterness, the price she knows she will pay for a life led without intimacy.
The Tessmans' infantilism means they are easy prey for Jasper Britton's wonderfully poisonous Judge Brack, the biggest bully in the playground. Brack's mistake is to underestimate Hedda. From everything we've seen, we know that people genuinely do things like that.
· Until March 11. Box office: 0113-213 7700. Then touring.
