Ghosts, Gate Theatre, London <!-- none onestar twostar threestar fourstar fivestar -->

As the audience take their seats for this powerful revival of Ibsen's Ghosts, Niamh Cusack's Mrs Alving is seen gazing pensively through the rain-streaked windows of the claustrophobic conservatory set. Ninety-five unbroken minutes later, she is back there, staring altogether more desperately in the direction of an invisible sun.

In between, on the revolving cube of Lez Brotherston's expressively stifling set, we have watched a life conducted by the principles of well-meaning but ill-advised repression fall apart.

It's a brilliantly sardonic stroke in this great play that a new orphanage is left disastrously uninsured in case the public suspect its founders of a lack of trust in God. For a painfully misguided insurance policy of another kind helped to create the current excruciating situation; when he was a boy, Mrs Alving sent her son to live abroad in the hope that he would escape moral contamination from her secretly dissolute husband, whose reputation as a pillar of the community she continued to bolster. Oswald has returned as a young man and fate, it turns out, has mocked her precautions; he is suffering the sins of the father in the cruel form of syphilis.

Cusack twists the heart as the proud, doting mother who at first is touchingly unsure how to make up to her son for the lost years, and then as she registers the appallingly ironic conditions of their belated intimacy. Christian Coulson's still, soulful-eyed Oswald radiates an unbearably moving air of corrosive shame and emotional need as he stumblingly discloses the full horror of his predicament to his mother.

Anna Mackmin's taut, involving production uses a new version of the play by Amelia Bullmore. On occasion, this strikes an incongruously modern note both in its phrasing and in a more direct style of irony.

Cusack and Finbar Lynch (a wonderful mix of ramrod rectitude and shifty self-concern as Pastor Manders) skilfully evoke the awkwardness of a relationship whose potential he denied when he refused to give her refuge from her husband.

Paul Copley finds layers of comic self-amusement in the drunken reprobate Eng-strand and Sarah Smart flashes the mettle of the socially ambitious maid who is another manifestation of the Alvings' ancestral sins.

To 17 February (020-7229 0706)