Rosmersholm (Almeida Theatre)

It's often said that the Norwegian playwright Ibsen is the master of gloom.

And this masterpiece – a favourite of Freud’s – is proof.

It features three suicides, a lavish portion of sexual guilt and a generous helping of self-laceration.

Paul Hilton and Helen McCrory in Rosmersholm

This rare revival features the lovely Helen McCrory as the emancipated Rebecca West, a woman with a past and housekeeper to the ex-pastor Rosmer, whose wife chucked herself in the mill race and in whose death Rebecca is implicated.

Not exactly adulterers, the two have clearly got a thing going.

But the story is really about Rebecca's attempt to liven up this household, a riot of grey in Hildegard Bechtler's tastefully dull interiors.

Any chance of happiness is kyboshed by Kroll, the reactionary bigot who tries to recruit Rosmer into stopping the moral rot in the community.

Malcolm Sinclair has a field day as this starchy reviler of modern ways and he dominates the stage whenever he is on it with his hang 'em and flog 'em views. Great fun.

He is given a run for his money by Paul Moriarty's sozzled, bankrupt idealist who turns up like a bad penny.

There is also a radical newspaper editor (Peter Sullivan) through whom Ibsen, with amazing prescience, suggests the emerging power of the press.

But this would be a triumphant evening if it weren't for a time-wasting second interval, frequent inaudibility, and if Miss McCrory - in a debatable blonde wig --didn't treat her towering part (the novelist Rebecca West took her name from this character) as a supporting role.

Brilliantly natural though she is, there's a lack of vim in her bleached portrayal that makes it hard to believe she would rev anything up, least of all a ringing wet old vicar like Paul Hilton's ditheringly liberal Rosmer.

The mystery of their death pact - a case of mutual atonement? - isn't interpreted in Anthony Page's otherwise minutely detailed production. But it's fascinatingly watchable all the same.