HENRIK IBSEN took a lot of flak for his treatments of “the woman question,” with critics queueing up to berate him for trying to create feminist heroines.
 
In A Doll's House, the poor man was damned by some for portraying the plight of Nora Helmer as a woman trapped by her sex, while others saw her as an Everyman figure – simply an ordinary human being struggling with life.
 
This new production goes way beyond such banal interpretations. The action is transported to Calcutta, where Nora become Niru, a Bengali woman married to Tom (Elliot Cowan), an English colonial administrator and from the moment he strides on stage, he exudes the whiff of the slave owner.
 
Cowan’s energetic portrayal shows a man under great pressure, much of it self-inflicted. Pompous and proud, he’s terrified of a loss of status, while Anjana Vasan is perfect in the role of the wife seen as a “very pretty but expensive pet” by her swaggering husband.

Graceful and coquettish one minute, plotting and manipulative the next, she is mesmerising.
 
The adaptation, by the award-winning Tanika Gupta, elicits more layers and nuances from the text. The clunky modern word “intersectionality” often conveys very little yet what it attempts to describe is made flesh here.

Niru is not the only woman trapped by her biology. Mrs Lahiri (Tripti Tripuraneni) is marked out by her white sari and when she appeals for work she says that she is a widow, so “there’s no-one to prevent me from working.”
 
There’s a lot of discomfort here, sometimes hand-in-hand with comedy — Niru telling an old friend that her sons are named “Peter and Bob” draws a chuckle and then a sigh. Helmer the colonialist has children in his own image, revealing that his sentimentality is a veneer. He is utterly indifferent to his wife’s feelings and that will be his downfall.
 
There is melodrama in the uncovering of Niru’s secret, unleashing in Helmer a fury which is both terrifying and clownish and Rachel O’Riordan's deft direction, with delicate shifts in pace and tone, is terrific.
 
Niru may be repressed due to both her sex and race but that makes her liberation, when it comes, all the more joyous. The standing ovation was well deserved but it was noticeable women were first to get to their feet.
 
Runs until October 5, box office: lyric.co.uk