@ Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until Mon 11 Apr 2015

Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler is a difficult character to like. Capricious, spiteful and self-absorbed, but mainly simply bored with life in her gilded cage, she takes her pleasure in small acts of spite and the power she weaves over her many admirers including her new dull but decent husband. Had she been born a generation later or a class lower she might have found positive outlets for her passion and creativity, but trapped in the straitjacket of late Victorian middle class Norwegian society where status and position is everything she can only entertain herself by pulling the wings off the various flies caught in her web.

Into her world comes Thea Elvsted (Jade Williams), an old schoolmate who has left her husband to follow Eilbert Loevborg (Jack Tarlton), an academic rival of her husband and an old admirer of Hedda’s who has pulled himself back from a life of drunken debauchery to achieve fame and reputation as an author. Her manipulation of both these characters leads to ruin and self-destruction, all brought about by Hedda’s desire to shape the world as she wants it.

At times there’s a little too much of the drawing room farce about this production, but what prevents it becoming West End light entertainment are the performances, particularly a magnetic turn as Hedda from Nicola Daley. Poised and poisonous, alluring and unstable, she perfect captures the contradiction and fragility that underpin this seemingly confident woman. Her treatment of Theia in particular masks her jealously of the fact that she has done what Hedda can never do and placed her destiny in her own hands.

Ibsen drew Hedda so well that the other roles can seem little more than props. However, Benny Young as Judge Brack brings a louche charm to the part, and Lewis Hart does some good work in the thankless role of her husband. Only Jade Williams’ Thea fails to convince with an over-simpering take on a character who is already insubstantial.

This is a classic play. Its themes of freedom, constraint and sacrifice still resonate, but this production, despite much that’s good in it, is ultimately too frail a vehicle to carry the weight of all the ideas.