Theatre - Ibsen's anti-heroine exercises all her demonic power. By Michael Portillo Hedda Gabler Almeida Theatre, London N1

When Henrik Ibsen was 61, he met Emilie Bardach, aged 18, and fell in love. It was his decision to break off the relationship, but reeling from the affair he wrote Hedda Gabler, creating a demonic anti-heroine. "There's only one thing I have a vocation for: boring myself to death," remarks Hedda. But on her brief journey towards the grave, she relieves the tedium by manipulating the lives and choreographing the deaths of her friends.

It is meant as a compliment to say that Eve Best makes a prize bitch in the title role. Hedda is a nasty sneering snob. You would call her insensitive if it were not so obvious that her tactless remarks are rehearsed. She squashes her well-meaning husband and his ever-fussing aunt like cockroaches. She plays mind games with her nearest and dearest, picking at their most sensitive scabs to humiliate them.

Best is superbly offhand. There is something Sloaney about her disdain. Indeed, Richard Eyre's adaptation, although it keeps all the Norwegian names of the original, is very English, and his actors express themselves with a modern kind of ease. The language works beautifully. With the exception of the play's very last line (which is Ibsen's, not Eyre's), every word seems natural and unforced.

Eyre has also given us a beautiful period-piece production. Gillian Raine as Aunt Juliana appears in lavish and elegant dresses that none the less attract Hedda's contempt. At the rear of the set, a gauze curtain bears the imprint of a panelled wall on which hangs an immense portrait. But we can dimly see through to the dining room beyond. While Hedda engages in the most shocking conversations with her former and prospective lovers, we are excruciatingly aware of her husband's nearness on the other side of the wall. In the play's final unforgettable moments, a splash of blood is projected on to the gauze.

The acting throughout is perfection. There is no weak link. Raine superbly captures every mannerism of a doting maiden aunt, trying by all means to make friends with the hoity-toity Hedda. Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Hedda's husband, George Tesman, is a remarkable study in weakness and dullness, the qualities that most provoke her scorn.

Lisa Dillon copes well with Thea Elvsted, a silly woman who spends most of the play whining or weeping. She is a lamb for Hedda to slaughter, having committed two crimes. During their shared schooldays, Thea was admired for her golden locks. Now, despite the mediocrity of her mind, she has unwittingly become the muse of the genius writer Eilert Lovborg, Hedda's sometime lover, and has collaborated on his brilliant new book.

With staccato delivery, Jamie Sives interprets Eilert as an intellect living on the brink of self-destruction. He is an academic like George, but otherwise they are different. His mind is set alight by ideas and sexual passion. We may not sympathise with Hedda in many things, but we at least understand why she prefers Eilert.

Among the men, the most compelling performance is Iain Glen as Judge Brack. This insidious predator enters the Tesman house unannounced through the French window from the garden. He spends time with Hedda unchaperoned and joins her in ridiculing her husband. He proposes a triangular arrangement, and when his idea meets resistance from Hedda, he employs blackmail to strengthen his hand. Glen is sexual danger incarnate. But like most bullies, Judge Brack is also a coward. He goes to pieces when Hedda fires a gun past him, and at the violent climax of the play, he whimpers in terror over the catastrophe that he has helped to engineer.

This production leaves us in no doubt of Ibsen's extraordinary accomplishment in Hedda Gabler. This play shocks us deeply 120 years after it was written. Hedda vows: "For once in my life, I want to control a man's fate." She lures Eilert into the abyss of alcoholic and sexual excess, and instructs him on how to conduct his suicide, commanding him to do it "beautifully". In a flabbergasting scene, in which Best is at her most gloriously macabre, Hedda burns Eilert's book, feeding the pages of the manuscript into a stove, cackling like a witch: "I am burning your baby, Thea."

Evidently, Emilie Bardach shared at least some of Hedda's characteristics. She was a bored upper-class girl with "a tired look in her mysterious eyes". She sought to exercise power over Ibsen by enticing him away from his marriage. For Ibsen, writing Hedda Gabler represented "a process of spiritual liberation and catharsis". "The essential thing," he confided in a letter, "is to draw a clear distinction between what one has merely experienced and what one has spiritually lived through; for only the latter is proper material for creative writing."

Hedda is one of theatre's cruellest and most destructive females. The teenage Emilie must have been quite a girl.

Booking on 020 7359 4404 until 30 April

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