The unhappy home in which Henrik Ibsen’s drama unfolds is part haunted house, part elegant prison. Anna Mackmin’s grippingly grotesque production of Amelia Bullmore’s new version of the play allows us to peep through rain-streaked windows at the horrors within.

The brilliant design, by Lez Brotherston, offers a rotating wooden conservatory filled with books — a liminal space linking the bleak landscape outside with the stifling interior; just beyond, twinkling chandeliers, white linen and shining silver are visible. In the comfortless room among the towers of tomes, lives implode, terrible truths are revealed and the ghosts of the past cast their deforming shadow over the present.

The most powerful unseen presence is that of dead Captain Alving, revered as a pillar of the community but in fact, his wife reveals, a womanising drunk. Her long-unspoken terror that her husband’s failings would infect their son Osvald is only part of a welter of dangerous secrets that have lain concealed. As one by one the ugly offspring of repression and time-honoured falsehood limp into the light, Ibsen coolly administers shock after shock and Mackmin spares us nothing.

Bullmore’s adaptation is sinewy and sharp, but some key moments are spelt out with unnecessary bald emphasis. A few modern-vernacular incongruities also jar. But the whole is cruelly fascinating and crackingly acted. Niamh Cusack as Mrs Alving shows us the passionate, frustrated young woman she once was, as well as the skilled deceiver and desperate mother she has become. Christian Coulson’s febrile Osvald has a translucent fragility, while Finbar Lynch as Pastor Manders, whose attachment to the appearance of moral rectitude makes him both a hateful hypocrite and peculiarly attractive to Mrs Alving, is chillingly steeped in self-interest.

Paul Copley tempers the comedy of Engstrand the dipsomaniac carpenter with nastiness, and as his supposed daughter Regine, the Alvings’ socially ambitious maid, Sarah Smart has both sensuality and steely determination. All are riveting — and the production’s final image, of Cusack’s Mrs Alving losing her mind in her glass cell, is unforgettable. Intense, almost unbearably taut and entirely absorbing.

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