Ghosts, Barbican, London, ***

Passionate romps in Ibsen's repressed drawing-room

Ibsen is clearly both an idol to Ingmar Bergman and the red rag to his bull. There's something about the great Norwegian dramatist's plays, with their highly specific stage directions and naturalistic settings, that goads the great Swedish director into fits of claustrophobic rebellion. He directed a production of A Doll's House that wrenched the play free (or, at any rate, away) from traditional drawing-room realism. Now he turns his attention to Ghosts, the play which, in the fate of Mrs Alving, shows what might have happened if Nora had failed to defy convention and had sacrificed herself and her loved ones on the altar of propriety. The luminous Pernilla August stars once again.

Evidently Bergman believes that inside every Ibsen play, there is a more explicit drama struggling to get out. In a programme note for this Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden visit, Bergman tells us that Ibsen cannily "put the anger of his play into an iron corset ... I have taken out a pair of big metal scissors and cut [the] corset into pieces, without altering the basic themes''.

The Alving sitting-room here has a spooky, phantasmal feel. The walls are flimsy curtains, with trompe-l'oeil drawings of paintings and columns. Later, these are dulled to a funereal black. Bergman's tactic seems to be to make overt what in the original is repressed and implicit. Ms August's striking and vehement Mrs Alving launches herself at Pastor Manders (Jan Malmasjo) and locks him in a long, passionate kiss. Painted spectre-white and in modern dress like some time-travelling corpse, Jonas Malmasjo's Osvald – the artist's son who has returned from Paris in the final stages of a fatal disease – makes to brain his mother with a wine bottle, uses four-letter words, engages in energetic romps with the maid and, in the last scene, wrenches off his pyjamas and crawls convulsively towards his mother, holding out his packet of morphine tablets.

After that surprise snog, Pastor Manders gets a laugh by saying "I think we've covered just about everything''. This production uncovers just about everything and it is debatable whether that is wise.