So Ibsen, as we all know, is the embodiment of late 19th-century naturalistic drama, perhaps an early champion of women’s emancipation, but essentially a fourth-wall dramatist using the form to make his point.

Well, not any more, after this extraordinary treatment by the New York avant-gardiste Lee Breuer and his Mabou Mines company. The production, first seen in 2003, has already toured the world. I doubt, however, that its mix of vaudeville, melodrama and grand opera, backed by lavish expanses of red plush, has looked better than in the Edwardian splendour of the King’s Theatre.

You may have been forewarned that all the women are especially tall and the men are played by people of limited stature – that is to say about 4ft. This is designed to emphasise the absurdity, as Ibsen saw it, of women being virtually owned by their menfolk.

It is an arresting and profound visual metaphor and no doubt an uncomfortable one for some. But it may give you a feel for the scale of this reinterpretation if I say that that is only the beginning of the imaginative and cognitive leaps that the production takes.

Nora Helmer (a sensational performance by Maude Mitchell) and her friend Kristine Lind (Janet Girardeau) tower over the fold-out doll’s house set, with its doll-size furniture, marooned in a semicircle of red velvet drapes. Dressed in impeccable period costumes, they move and speak in a curiously exaggerated way, faintly suggestive that they might not really be women at all but giant humanoid automata. (Breuer points out that in several languages the word for doll and puppet is the same.)

The theatricalisation extends to the cod Norwegian accents that the cast use throughout.

You would think all this would bring the play to a standstill. Instead, as this high-concept, nonreal approach is driven through in every detail, complete with an elegant pianist accompanying each scene with snatches of Grieg, it illuminates every line of a text that, apart from a few cuts, remains exactly as Ibsen wrote it. It all leads inexorably to the jaw-dropping final tableau in which Nora announces in the style of 19th-century grand opera (cleverly pastiched by the composer Eve Beglarian) to her husband Torvald that she is leaving the doll’s house for ever, singing not just to us but to an audience of evening dress-wearing puppets revealed in operatic boxes in the back wall.

Ibsen will never be the same again. Would that all classics could be so searchingly but lovingly re-examined.

Final performance today. Box office: 0131-473 2000