Strindberg thought Ibsen “a silly old bluestocking”, but Ibsen kept a portrait of Strindberg on his study wall, because he was fascinated by its “mad eyes”. You can imagine them blazing when the demented Swede wrote Creditors in 1888, when his first marriage had failed. Indeed, I felt I saw those eyes at the end of Alan Rickman’s fine revival, maniacally fizzing away on each side of Owen Teale’s nose.

Teale plays Gustav, who is a professor and, as we guess very quickly, was the first husband of Anna Chancellor’s Tekla, a successful novelist. But her second husband, Tom Burke’s Adolph, doesn’t know who Gustav is when the professor collars him and subjects his marriage, psyche, life and career as an artist to sceptical scrutiny. Adolph sees Gustav as a wise new friend when he’s a Swedish Iago who convinces him that Tekla is a manipulative blend of whore and cannibal incapable of anything but loving herself and ingesting men.

Some of Gustav’s claims are so preposterous that they would have left even Othello in stitches of disbelieving laughter. Though Adolph is a bit of an invalid in mind and body, how can he be persuaded that sex with Tekla will give him epilepsy? Yet Teale’s Gustav is mesmeric and formidably articulate, so it’s not surprising that Burke’s Adolph wanly nods when the professor delivers David Greig’s translation of a very Strindbergian passage. Woman is “a child who’s somehow managed to shoot up to adult height without growing any muscle, a chronic anaemic who haemorrhages 13 times a year”.

Nevertheless, Creditors isn’t as misogynistic a play as, say, The Father or Miss Julie. That’s partly because Gustav is more a vindictive liar than an aggrieved exhusband and because Chancellor’s Tekla, when she returns from her trip away, doesn’t make that bad an impression. She somewhat infantilises her second husband and allows herself to be sweet-talked by her first; but, again, we’re more appalled by Adolph’s destructive deceit than put off by anything this strong, attractive woman says or does.

There’s disgust and anger here, but it’s directed more at a ruthless male and the institution of marriage than at an uppity female.

And the result is to rescue one of Strindberg’s least performed plays from its oubliette. With Burke’s Adolph moving from doldrums to despair, Rickman’s revival isn’t only well acted. It isn’t only forceful, riveting stuff. It’s as balanced a picture of gender warfare as Strindberg was capable of producing.

At the Donmar Warehouse, WC2 (0870 0606624), until November 15.

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