Michael Grandage is quite an ironist. Just in time for Christmas he brings us one of the greatest attacks on goodwill ever penned. But the pleasure of seeing Ibsen's 1885 masterpiece, in its first London showing for 15 years, lies in relishing its blend of faultless technique and thematic timelessness.
David Eldridge's version brings out Ibsen's permanent relevance without any textual coarsening. We watch enthralled as the idealistic Gregers Werle intervenes in the happy home life of Hjalmar Ekdal in an attempt to reveal its shaky moral foundations: in particular the family's economic dependence on Werle senior who may well be the father of Hjalmar's child. As Gregers wreaks his well-intentioned havoc, we are told he is afflicted by "a fever called 'I am always right'"; and it doesn't take much imagination to see that the fever is still flourishing in contemporary Britain.
But Ibsen's genius lay in creating men, not monsters: as Shaw said, while watching the play "you are getting deeper and deeper into your own life all the time". The photographer Hjalmar, in his idle fantasies and domestic dependence, induces moments of painful recognition. And even Gregers, although he is an agent of destruction, is no simple villain but a victim of heredity and a man who believes in what he calls "the claims of the ideal".
All this comes across strongly in Grandage's flawless production which acknowledges Ibsen's poetic symbolism while maintaining a sense of daily reality. Ben Daniels's Gregers is no bulging-eyed fanatic but a man who exudes a quiet, low-keyed certainty. He prowls round Hjalmar's airy Nordic studio, nicely realised in Vicki Mortimer's design, like a sympathetic detective looking for clues. He even exudes a kindly avuncularity towards the 14-year-old Hedvig which makes it all the more shocking when he tells everyone that they are living in "a poisonous swamp".
Paul Hilton also scrupulously follows Ibsen's injunction to play Hjalmar without any trace of parody. Hilton has a haggard, negligent charm that explains the affection Hjalmar induces: at the same time he brings out the character's fatal weakness as he prepares to abandon hearth and home. And there is superb support all round: from Sinead Matthews who has all of Hedvig's carefully articulated youthful curiosity, from Pete Eyre who captures her grandfather's dilapidated grandeur, from Michelle Fairley who reveals Gina Ekdal's compassionate resilience and from Nicholas Le Prevost as a drunken doctor who is Ibsen's voice of sanity. Taken with Pillars of The Community, it is an evening that explains why Ibsen is the greatest dramatist after Shakespeare.
· Until February 18. Box office: 0870 060 6624