Strindberg was famous for impassioned misogyny and his vision of life as a series of deathly battles between the sexes. Alan Rickman's production of this fascinating, little-known tragicomedy, presented in a perfectly nuanced, witty version by David Greig, suggests Strindberg had a more complex and disturbing view of human relations. Creditors introduces a campaign of psychological terrorism into the old sex war. The solo but commanding terrorist is Gustav. This ex-husband arranges a fearful revenge on his former wife, the novelist Tekla, and on her new husband, the artist Adolph, whose crutches signify physical and emotional weakness.

Unfortunately Rickman reduces the potency and impact of Creditors by rendering it amusingly in realistic, black comedy format. The entire play, however, would be more convincing transmitted in expressionistic form as Gustav's dream of revenge. For Adolph's abject submission to the older man's ideas about women and his eagerness to accept the psychological brain-washing inflicted upon him by Gustav feels not so much masochistic as elements in a vengeance fantasy of which the older man dreams.

The scene is the empty lounge of a Swedish hotel near the sea, though the characters' intimate behaviour on designer Ben Stones's all-white, bedlike sofas makes it seem a fantasy location. Gustav, the model of sturdy, strutting self-confidence in Owen Teale's imposing performance, is first seen giving lessons in life to the far younger Adolph, whom he has just met. Tom Burke poignantly invests this character with self-doubts and selfpity, placidly accepting the assurance that he has been emasculated, consumed and controlled by Tekla. Gustav's crazy demand that Adolph abstain from sex to avoid epilepsy and the weird assertion that the young man appears at death's door are accepted with absurd, doleful docility: "What sort of terrible power do you have in you," Adolph murmurs.

After Anna Chancellor's impressive Tekla, in erotic and practical control of her enthralled but protesting husband, returns to the hotel lounge, it is as if she were set upon demonstrating the truth of Gustav's malign verdict upon her as a wife whose love for Adolph has been transformed into sibling affection. Yet in the under-energised, climactic encounter between Gustav and Tekla, it is the man not the woman who is set madly upon destruction and mysteriously achieves it. For once in Strindberg the male becomes the more dangerous of the species.