The women in this adaptation of The Doll’s House are all normal-sized or taller, the men all under four feet tall, and the set built to their proportions so that the women must stoop or crawl to get through a door. A bit literal, perhaps, but we get the point - the women are trapped in a male-created world that is too small for them.

The question now is what else this production will have to tell us about the play in the remaining one hundred sixty-nine minutes.

And the answer is not much. There is a point being made by having Maude Mitchell pitch her voice and characterisation of Nora somewhere between an idiot child and the dumbest of dumb blondes - she is indeed being infantalised by her husband - but, as with the sizes, the device says what it has to say within moments and then lingers on to diminishing effect.

There is considerably less point to giving everyone silly accents of sometimes Clouseau-ish thickness, to having the maid be grotesquely pregnant, and to making a running and irrelevant series of jokes about the onstage pianist. And actively fighting the meanings of the play are a couple of phantasmagorical nightmare sequences, some simulated oral sex, and determinedly unsubtle direction that has everyone move within seconds from unironic nineteenth-century melodramatic excesses to pratfall slapstick and back.

New York-based Mabou Mines has been directed by Lee Breuer since 1970 and has made its name with both original works and deconstructions of classics, and Dollhouse reflects some of what is recognisably the house style. But by the time this play reaches its end, and the most famous sound effect in world drama has been replaced by a dream sequence for Torvald in which Nora stands naked and bald in one of the King’s Theatre boxes as they lip sync to operatic voices singing the dialogue of the final scene, backed by a chorus of puppets, then all pretence of illuminating or adapting Ibsen has been dropped, and the evening has become a celebration of Lee Breuer, by Lee Breuer.