Michael Grandage's anaemic, miscast revival of this late, great Ibsen drama from 1896 serves a reminder of how difficult it is to catch the right tone and bring John Gabriel Borkman to blazing theatrical life.

The play makes a resonant assault upon the morality of financiers who plunder other men's savings to fund their entrepreneurial dreams. It describes them as so besotted by money that they betray those they love and life itself.

Grandage, though, does not steer a sensible line between melodramatic excess, to which Ibsen was prone, and contemporary actors' preference for a humorous, ironic and flippant take upon the playwright.

Since Borkman productions are rare, young theatregoers and passionate Ibsenites may still be spellbound by this enthralling view of a family in meltdown.

Admittedly David Eldridge's new version achieves a pared-down, mock-Victorian stylishness and clarity. The production looks ideal in Peter McKintosh's sombre design: a drawing-room with snow falling on a wilderness of birch trees, the wind moaning.

Upstairs in faint lamplight, windows shuttered, Borkman mocks David Burke's old-fashioned doddering clerk.

Ian McDiarmid takes the intimidating title role of this embittered bank director, in disgrace after imprisonment for grand-scale financial misappropriation of clients' assets, and lets it drop like half a ton of cotton wool.

Following in the famous footsteps of Donald Wolfit, Ralph Richardson and Paul Scofield, he cuts Borkman down to the size and status of a ponderous, sarcastic, mildly discomfited assistant bank manager in Victorian Godalming who ran off with 50 golden guineas.

Borkman, with his deluded belief he will rise to glory again, is likened to a caged wolf. McDiarmid, more of a haughty tomcat, lacks a trace of nervous energy or serious emotional turbulence.

As his grief-stricken, resentful wife, Deborah Findlay's Gunhild - who long since placed her husband in the Norwegian version of Coventry while nursing a pathetic hope that her son Erhart might redeem the family name - looks far too young.

She adopts the inappropriate air of a sulky, superannuated teenager. She labours mightily to scale the heights of petulance.

Penelope Wilton as Gunhild's twin sister Ella, whose love Borkman rejected for the sake of Mammon, is the one player thrillingly possessed by Ibsen firepower, by fury, memorable pain and grief.

All three pent-up protagonists have hearts as much in cold storage as the wintry landscape and face up to a familiar Ibsen catastrophe: the recriminating call from the past, with its devastating backlash of home truths, is brought down upon the couple when the dying Ella arrives, eager to make Erhart her heir and take her name.

The play unfolds with something of the rapt, psychological suspense of a why-they-dunnit - or at least it should.

Wilton, eyes looking daggers, turns upon Borkman with a terrific rasping fury and sadness in their scene of confrontation, when she accuses him of having betrayed her love. MacDiarmid's becalmed, placid response engenders only torpor.

Rafe Spall's monotonic, dismally deadpan Erhart opts for hedonism and sex with Lolita Chakrabarti's ridiculous, hand-waving Wilton, who resembles a downmarket refugee from Celebrity Love Island. Where was the light, flirtatious femme fatale Ibsen intended? No dramatic tension rises.

McDiarmid's Borkman walks out into the freezing air with Ella and succumbs to flights of wild fantasy in the cool, casual manner of a latenight Oslo stroller. Ibsen is left bloodless and betrayed.