Battle of the elements: The Lady from the Sea WYP, Leeds

If Ibsen's heroine Ellida is 'the lady from the sea', what is her husband, Wangel? A busy, middle-aged provincial doctor, there seems nothing elemental about him. He can no longer pause to touch the earth, still less scale the mountain's peak. He seems best described as a shore- based establishment. The surprise of The Lady from the Sea is that he turns out to be as interesting, and indeed heroic, as the young woman he has landed as his second wife.

Symbolically they come from different worlds - and theatrically. He inhabits the over-furnished drawing-room of A Doll's House, she the glacier of Brand. Tim Hatley's design is an understated compromise of these two styles. The stage is an expanse of salt-scourged grey-green planking, suggesting both the featureless ocean and a verandah. Boulders are lashed to a grid above the characters' heads, sometimes forbiddingly granitic, at others tinted a romantic violet.

In casting Josette Simon as Ellida, the director, Lindsay Posner, makes the most obvious gesture of symbolic difference. She appears with her black skin glistening from the water, an ebony mermaid in an etiolated Nordic world, a figure of commanding presence and fascination, but lost. How can we not sympathise with this stranded creature, especially as the extremity of her tale unfolds: long before Wangel 'bought' her, it emerges, she was betrothed to a mysterious stranger, a compelling demon who wore a pearl 'like a dead fish's eye' and who will return for her. The sea is desire and freedom, whereas her life in Wangel's house offers only the bonds of marriage and the neurosis of an imprisoned family. When the stranger does return, surely she must go with him, even if what he truly represents is death.

It is now that Wangel rises so unexpectedly in interest and in our estimation. The anxious skip of desperate jollity that Pip Donaghy gives him at first makes him seem that familiar Ibsen husband, who humours his wife much as he would plump a cushion. But if his body is lightsome, his voice can deepen into gravity. He recognises that the Stranger's siren call is no less a negation of Ellida's will than his own marriage 'bargain'. Whichever of them she chooses, he insists, she must decide of her own free will. To bring the conventional doctor convincingly to this revelation is difficult, but Donaghy manages it excellently.

Meanwhile, on a less exalted level, Wangel's daughters Bolette and Hilde, her former tutor Arnholm and a young would-be sculptor, Lyngstrand, are enacting a parallel play of freedom and determination. This is part comic, part satiric, part raw pain. As the blanched Bolette, Matilda Ziegler's navigation of these conflicting moods is intriguing, but Lindsay Posner's direction has not quite found the right combination of notes to make this sub-plot cohere. For all its symbolism, there is also something nearly skittish in this play which produces a mix that this valuable production has not quite coped with.

Ends tonight in Leeds (0532 442111); then at the Lyric, Hammersmith from 21 July (081-741 2311)