“TO LIVE is to battle with trolls in the vaults of heart and brain,” Henrik Ibsen opined in the privacy of a letter when writing Ghosts. “To write: this is to sit in judgement over oneself.”

Publicly, though, he argued that “in none of my plays is the author so completely absent as in this last one.”

But most telling of all is neither of these statements but the contradiction between them. The Royal and Derngate’s production of Ghosts, in a new adaptation by Mike Poulton, brings the play’s message of the conflict between the public and private spheres to the fore.

None of the characters occupy an easy role in this dichotomy. Helen Alving (Penny Downie) is the homemaker and matriarch who holds together the play’s single setting — her house — while battling the legacies of its past.

She has spent the inheritance from her late husband on an orphanage in his memory, though this very public gesture is designed to be a cleansing of secrets she wishes to remain in the home.

Her son Osvald (Pierro Niel-Mee) has recently returned from a decadent life in Paris, with a set of values alien to the life of the Norwegian island where the drama takes place. In contrast, the embodiment of the local establishment Pastor Manders (James Wilby, excellent) will stop at nothing in his quest to preserve both personal and civic reputations.

The role of Regina Engstrand (Eleanor McLoughlin) is a subversion of a theatrical stereotype. As the family’s maidservant she should be the natural conduit between domestic life and the outside world. In fact, she emerges as the play’s real protagonist, in spite of her agency being threatened from all sides.

Declan Conlan plays her troubled father, determined to resuscitate his own reputation through a plan to open a home for retired sailors and the brutality of patriarchy is never far away, even less so in this production.

Under the skilful direction of Lucy Bailey, McLoughlin excels, shifting seamlessly between variations in accent and register as she navigates the stage and addresses each of her alleged masters, while Niel-Mee resists the temptation to over-egg his anguish, an all-too-common predicament among actors playing the young men of Ibsen’s plays.

Mike Britton’s set captures the internal conflicts, with the innovative use of a translucent glass screen realising Ibsen’s vision of an internal setting without giving it a claustrophobia out of kilter with the vast landscapes so crucial to Ibsen’s dramas.

The play’s original Norwegian title, Gengangere, translates not simply as “ghosts” but as “those who walk again,” which can include events which repeat themselves and the haunters of haunts in the less than spiritual sense — the bourgeois theatre included.

This production is worthwhile for drawing out the characters’ strongest bond — their complicity — and thus holding up a mirror before we too sit in judgement.

Runs until May 19, box office: royalandderngate.co.uk