If I were a producer I would want to be the type who puts Ibsen's play about family secrets on in the West End. There is something miraculous about 21st-century attention spans being held with just dialogue set in one bleakly-lit Norwegian room with only the rattle of incessant rain for music. This is a classic feel-bad play.
But I would need a reason to put it on, whether it be the director's vision or the casting. Both are solid here, but neither is the stuff of theatrical triumphs.
A few years ago Iain Glen was the cornerstone of one of the greatest theatrical evenings of my life when he played Arthur Miller's heroic rationalist John Proctor in The Crucible. This time I left the theatre convinced that, for his directorial debut, Glen has miscast himself as the religiously irrational chauvinist Pastor Mandors. Also just off target is Lesley Sharp's widow Helene, whose 21st-century ironic touch sits oddly with 19th century authoritarianism.
But the play still packs a punch and with the Harry Treadaway's dying son pleading to be killed by his mother, it chimes eerily with current assisted-suicide news stories, too.
(www.duchesstheatre.co.uk)