It's certainly uneven, but Hannah Eidinow's staging of Ibsen's poetic, folkloric drama of passion and repression exerts a fierce compulsion. That's thanks partly to an elegantly pungent, Irish-inflected new version by Frank McGuinness, and largely to Lia Williams, whose Ellida is a creature of complex fascination. What surrounds her is not always of a similar calibre. But this Lady's emotional waves sweep most reservations aside.

Angular in sea-green silk, Williams's Ellida is no fey dreamy somnambulist - she is living in terror. Torn away from the sea that she yearns for and a dangerously intense love affair with a mariner to an uneventful existence in a small fjord holiday town, she is ill-equipped to be either dutiful second wife to Jonathan Hackett's warmly sympathetic Dr Wangel (pictured, with Williams), or stepmother to his two daughters. She's a sharply intelligent, unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage.

During the mountain-climbing excursion, her wild wail of salute to the sea is countered by her stepdaughter Bolette's banal “Lovely up here, isn't it?”. The contrast of attitude deftly demonstrates the psychological oceans between them. The agony of this Ellida is not only about her sensation of living death, of drowning on dry land, but about her inability to comprehend it.

Williams shows us how pained and frustrated she is by her husband and his arid practicality. And yet it is a kind of sickness she suffers; after the arrival of her former lover, who wants to lure her back to sea with him, she assumes the appearance of a psychiatric patient, febrile, hollow-eyed, haunted.

The person closest to understanding Ellida in Eidinow's production is her wilful younger stepdaughter Hilde. Beautifully played by Fiona O'Shaughnessy, she is a mischievous water nymph with muddy feet and flowers in her dark hair, who, taunting the sickly would-be artist Lyngstrand, brandishes a switch as if she were considering giving him a stinging thwack with it. Her eventual connection with her elusive stepmother is unexpectedly electric and touchingly lovely.

It's a shame that Chris Moran's Lyngstrand is a doltish caricature, and that the marriage of convenience brokered between Alison McKenna's Bolette and Sean Campion's crusty Arnholm doesn't feel more like an act of heartbreaking desperation. But if the production is in danger of coming adrift, it is anchored by the unfailingly absorbing Williams.

Box office: 020-7503 1646

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