The excellent Rosamund Pike, so effective as the cowering wife of a bullying husband in the Old Vic’s 2007 revival of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight, is seen as a woman of markedly different stamp this week in the title role of Henrik Ibsen’s celebrated shocker Hedda Gabler. This time a husband bows to petticoat rule as practised by a spoilt aristocrat who, aware that she has married beneath her, turns to wickedness through sheer boredom.

Pike offers a truly frightening picture of the appalling Hedda, the beautiful and pampered daughter of a general, who becomes trapped in a loveless marriage (on her side at least) to a dull-dog historian husband, Tesman (Robert Glenister). She is what would now be called a manipulative woman, a puppet mistress out to pull the strings in the hope that others will dance for her amusement. Some do, and some don’t, which is rather the point of the play.

We meet her first as she and her husband, back from a five-month honeymoon, settle into their new home, a lavish property only acquired through the generosity – reckless generosity, it turns out – of Tesman’s doting Aunt Juliana (Anna Carteret). Her kindness only provokes Hedda to cruelty, seen in her snubbing pretence to believe that Aunt Juju’s new hat belongs to servant Bertha (Jane Whiteside).

One by one her other victims appear, among them magistrate’s wife Mrs Elvsted (Zoe Watts), who is well on the way to making a fool of herself with Tesman’s academic rival – and soon, it transpires, love rival too – the dangerous and dissipated Loevborg. It says much for the naivety of Tesman, incidentally, that he has already regretted his rival’s absence from the honeymoon party. Loevborg himself, when he arrives on the scene, reveals in Colin Tierney’s performance enough of the wild-eyed genius to start to explain his importance in so many lives. In many ways he is a sympathetic character, very different in this respect from the calculating Judge Brack (Tim McInnerny, right), a cynical bachelor who seems determined to find any route to Hedda's heart and bed.

This is a fine offering from Theatre Royal Bath Productions, tautly directed by Adrian Noble and boasting an excellent set by Anthony Ward, which presents a credible impression of the Tesman’s spacious home. A curious feature of the production are the occasional very long, almost dangerous, pauses Noble allows his actors, which convey the suggestion – a not unthinkable one where this play is concerned in my experience – that they are about to dry.

Oxford Playhouse, until Saturday. Tel: 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).