Mrs Affleck, Cottesloe, National Theatre, London

Ibsen's late symbolist masterpiece Little Eyolf is a shattering study of a marriage destroyed by the death of a child and the revelation of an incestuous love affair. While Ibsen has an uncanny knack of coming back to hit us where it hurts in matters of political skulduggery, social hypocrisy and tainted idealism, his great plays pullulate with emotional and sexual loss and yearning, none more so painfully "contemporary" than this one.

So it might seem an act of bizarre perversity for the playwright Samuel Adamson to suppose that an update to the Kentish coast of 1955 will reverberate any more powerfully than it already does in Ibsen's 1894 Norwegian fjord (as revealed in Adrian Noble's brilliant RSC revival in 1996).

But Adamson isn't just translating Ibsen; he's writing a new play on the outline. In the original, Rita and Alfred Allmers are stricken with guilt over the fact that their nine-year-old Eyolf became crippled when they made love. The symbolism is stretched further when a mysterious Rat Catcher lures the boy to his death in the fjord. Alfred's half-sister, Asta, reveals that the taboo on their love is dissolved – she was not, after all, the daughter of his father – but she leaves the town anyway. The Allmers resolve to run a children's home as a mark of their own redemption.

It's quite different with Rita and Alfred Affleck. Played by Claire Skinner, sweetly glacial, and Angus Wright in a variety of elongated, tortured poses, they are a couple driven apart by his war experience and a severe case of writer's block. He burbles out bits of King Lear, presumably because they live near Dover, while she quotes TS Eliot's "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" ("There is not even silence in the mountains") before descending into the water, stones in her pockets, like Virginia Woolf.

Adamson's purpose is to nail the fallacy of a brave new post-war world, represented by Bunny Christie's sleek suburban kitchen design and the playing of Naomi Frederick's Audrey (Asta) as a no-nonsense new-style teacher – magically reunited with the dead child in a flashback – and of Phil Cheadle's Jonathan Mortimer (Ibsen's Borgheim) as a town planner filling in the urban sprawl from Margate to London.

The distant metropolis also figures in Adamson's invention of a parallel West Indian mother and son; she, a nurse (Sarah Niles), and he, little George (Omar Brown or Rene Gray), witness to Oliver Affleck's drowning.

This is all fascinating, though none of it rings devastatingly true, and when Ibsen's Rat Wife turns up as Flea (Josef Altin), a rocker in black leathers and a greasy quiff, the weird mystery takes on a tenuous simplicity.

Some of the central scenes have a raw, unsettling quality, as when Rita taunts Alfred for not rising to the occasion on the kitchen table with a reference to Hamlet's "country matters" and a David Hare-like mantra, "Not in the kitchen, not on a Sunday, not in England."

But the way these characters think and speak is peculiar, too; would the parents of a crippled child – touchingly played by Wesley Nelson, who shares the role with Alfie Field – really refer to him as "Hopalong Cassidy," even in loving jest? The director, Marianne Elliott, worked miracles with Adamson on Ibsen's seemingly intractable Pillars of the Community a few years ago at the National, but the ambition of this project sends Ibsen out of kilter while failing to punch its own weight.

The traverse staging in the Cottesloe is another handicap. Laden with fine writing, a keen dramatic intelligence and good acting, the show still never catches fire.

In repertoire to 29 April (020-7452 3000; www.nationaltheatre.org.uk)