Recent days have seen a preponderance of sexism and repression on West End stages as well as in the news, with openings on successive nights of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance, a meditation on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus In Fur and now one of Ibsen’s studies of marriage as a potential suffocator of female autonomy.

However, The Lady From The Sea is towards the symbolic end of the Ibsen continuum. When Ellida Wangel’s long-presumed-dead first love tracks her down and demands that she leave her unsatisfying marriage to a small-town doctor with two young-adult stepdaughters, her legal and social obligations take second place to a numinous sense of selfhood and an awareness of more mystical bonds challenging her wedding vows. The whole opposition of land versus sea (Ellida is a compulsive daily swimmer) is a metaphor for the contrasting calls of fixity and rootlessness.

At least, in Elinor Cook’s new adaptation, she has warm water to swim in. This version has been relocated from a western Norwegian fjord in the 1880s to an unspecified Caribbean island in the final years of colonialism. This also allows undercurrents of race to enter the proceedings: Ellida and her former lover are played by black actors, and there is a suggestion that white Dr Wangel’s two white daughters and their stepmother have never properly bonded because, in part, of racial difference. Director Kwame Kwei-Armah, however, never stresses this dimension, going no further than to allow Ellida and the Stranger to veer from more or less Received Pronunciation into mild Antillean accents for a few seconds at a moment of maximum passion.

Nikki Amuka-Bird hits the right note of semi-detachment for Ellida without going airy-fairy; on the contrary, she always seems a fathom or so below the surface, and also handles Ellida’s mercurial moods beautifully, turning on a sixpence whether due to inner turmoil or superficial pretence. Finbar Lynch as Dr Wangel is measured and reasonable, almost infuriatingly so: considerate of Ellida yet unable until the climax to grasp fully her emotional conflict. Ellie Bamber is nicely petulant as younger daughter Hilde, Jonny Holden risibly precious as an invalid sculptor. Tom Scutt’s set, with its oversized aquarium tank, adds to the atmosphere of simultaneous symbolism and physical reality.

Written for the Financial Times.