“It appears Dr Stockmann has joined the aristocracy!” heckles one of the townspeople in Ibsen’s play. The doctor may be getting above himself, but it’s several rungs down the social ladder for Hugh Bonneville after his years as the Earl of Grantham in Downton Abbey.

The good doctor has some attitudes in common with his lordship: both believe that position brings responsibility towards the entire community, even if they don’t always understand how that may pan out. Here, Stockmann imagines there might be a march in his honour when he reveals the truth to his little Norwegian spa town. Since the truth is that the baths are bacteria-ridden, and his solution is to close the town’s only cash cow for two years or more and raise a huge sum in municipal taxes for drainage works, it’s safe to say that his imagination isn’t entirely accurate.

The opposition is led by an assortment of vested interests, principally the mayor. (If this sounds familiar, think what happens when word of the shark first breaks in the township of Amity in Jaws.) It so happens that the mayor is Stockmann’s elder brother, and the businessman whose tannery is the chief pollutant is the doctor’s father-in-law. Ibsen was a master, in plays like Ghosts and Hedda Gabler, of snaring his protagonists in webs of malice and misfortune; but never was there a web as intricate as the one in which Stockmann, his wife and children become entangled. By the end, after they have been outcast at a public meeting, it’s impossible for the Stockmanns to accommodate any one of their tormentors without frustrating the others and so bringing ruin upon their heads anyway.

This revival, directed with his customary care by Howard Davies, has been getting a lot of press attention – imagine, the Sun reviewing Ibsen! – on the dodgy grounds that it’s about “press freedom”. Rather, it’s about media agenda-peddling and collusion: Adam James is excellent as the editor of the town paper who puts its interests and his own above his supposed grand principles. But the centre of treachery is William Gaminara as the mayor, dignified and upright even as he puts the metaphorical noose around his brother’s neck. Bonneville relishes the doctor’s naïveté: he literally jumps for joy like a big kid when he thinks he has the upper hand, only to fall spectacularly to pieces, raging like King Lear. The climax of this is when he tells the town meeting that the real villains are not the bigwigs, but the community as a whole for allowing themselves to be manipulated. That’s another political argument familiar these days: “Shame on the lot of you for doing exactly as we told you to!”

Written for The Lady.