A Doll’s House, Picton Place, London

A "new, feminist" take on A Doll's House? It sounds, on the face of it, redundant. For what could be more pioneeringly feminist than Ibsen's great 1879 drama in which a woman slams the door on a marriage that reduces her to a pampered plaything and a husband who is revealed as more concerned about his public image than about her?

So I'm happy to report that Theatre Delicatessen's arresting and strangely persuasive pop-up version, directed by Frances Loy, honours the original, while challenging the notion that men and women are now equal in society by presenting the piece in modern dress and with an all-female cast.

The stage thrusts through the audience like a catwalk and at the start the performers put on a lingerie fashion-parade, striking attitudes that flicker between the suggestive and the maternal, accompanied by that now-laughably sexist Sixties Bacharach song "Hey, Little Girl!" – "For wives should always be lovers, too/Run to his arms, the moment he comes home to you". They then adopt costumes for an account of the play that, against all the odds, works on several levels.

Partly, the cross-gender casting of the male characters intimates how women are still expected to contort themselves into roles dictated by men. At the same time, there's a strong sense of vindication in the skill with which the performers pull off the impersonations – Margaret-Ann Bain is alarmingly convincing as a self-amused, sexually arrogant Torvald. You drift between full absorption in the proceedings and sudden jolting moments of Brechtian alienation, the latter reinforced by the calculated jarring of the two different periods. Polly Eachus makes a very touching Nora whose looks initially deceive you that she's just a groomed, airhead, shopaholic but who then charts, with sensitive shades of dismay, this heroine's journey into liberating disillusion.

To 5 February ( www.theatre delicatessen.co.uk)