When A Doll’s House opened in London in 1889, this paper pronounced that “it would be a misfortune were such a morbid and unwholesome play to gain the favour of the public”. How alluring those words now sound.

Ibsen’s drama is a powerful statement of his radical beliefs about gender, the folly of idealism and the nature of modern love. In essence, it is the story of woman who wakes up to reality. The married life of Nora Helmer — here Nora Vaughan — is based on a lie. She can lay claim to her humanity only by breaking sharply with convention.

This is hardly the stuff of parched antiquity, but Zinnie Harris’s new version of the play updates it — in a manner at once topical and trite. Instead of the severe landscape of Ibsen’s 1870s Norway, we are in London in 1909 in a drawing room cluttered with packing cases.

Ibsen’s upwardly mobile bank worker Helmer and junior lawyer Krogstad are now politicians called Thomas Vaughan and Neil Kelman; Toby Stephens’s Vaughan has recently supplanted the disgraced and bitter Kelman (Christopher Eccleston) as a Cabinet minister. It’s intriguing that the production’s “historical adviser” is Ffion Hague, for it has little to say about history, but plenty about political unpleasantness.

The attempt at relevance nevertheless feels gratuitous. If anything, it works against the play. And there are real problems of credibility. Anton Lesser’s Dr Rank has tuberculosis of the spine, yet seems peculiarly agile. Meanwhile, Thomas, who is supposed to be every inch the busy politico, appears to have a good deal of time for fatuous chat and to be weirdly unconcerned at the thought that his letterbox may contain a missive from the prime minister.

A quip that it’s much too late for Nora’s friend Christine (Tara Fitzgerald) to be worried about the excessive breadth of her hips feels comically misplaced. It seems absurd, too, that Christine should have considered Kelman the love of her life but had no idea of a way to find him. How hard can it have been to track down a Cabinet minister in 1909? None of this detracts from the performances, which are impressive.

As Nora, Gillian Anderson is poised and affecting. Fitzgerald is subtle. Eccleston, though miscast, exudes virile menace, while Stephens as Thomas is sympathetically unsympathetic, creating just the right impression of poorly armoured bluster.

Ultimately the production succeeds on the strength of the performances. But this fine group of actors, crisply marshalled by Kfir Yefet, would have been better served by a different version of the play.

Indeed there is a nagging sense that some of the cast have balked at the unnaturalness of this revision: they seem to chafe at the boundaries of the text, at times harking back tantalisingly to the true poetic and mysterious shades of Ibsen.
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