LAST year's best production by a London mile to play York was the National Theatre's Jane Eyre and the nation's figurehead company now returns with another female-centric scorcher, Hedda Gabler.

Belgian director Ivo van Hove's much vaunted production is on a tour directed by associate directors Jeff James and Rachel Lincoln, but entirely to his template and notes, and if you saw it last autumn in Hull in the early weeks on the road, it is even hotter now, and not only because of the fire that burns so fiercely, but because Henrik Ibsen's Scandi-Noir drama burns your heart even more intensely.

Reviewers were given a guided tour of the stage and backstage before Tuesday's show, a welcome insight not normally given, and it was fascinating to see Jan Versweyveld's set and lighting design close up: Hedda's father's pistols in a glass case; Hedda's wall mirror, her lipstick and a brush each attached to the wall too.

Those walls are plain boards, left unfurnished by decorators, along with paint buckets, because Hedda (Lizzy Watts) and her academic new husband Tesman (Abhin Galeya) have no money. Flowers are everywhere but Hedda loathes the stench. The fireplace is huge, ugly. Furniture is minimal; a paint-spattered chair, another uncomfortable chair and a dirty sofa that will be moved more than once, to a corner, even to face away from the audience at one point. And then there is Hedda's one possession, her piano that is as out of tune as she is with life.

The point of all this is that what we see is as much representing the barren landscape inside the head of the newly married but terminally bored Hedda as what is physically present. Berte, the maid (Madlena Nedeva), is always there, watching Hedda, such is her sense of oppression.

Hedda has married solely because the time was right, not through love of Tesman, a dour, second-rate academic and writer by comparison with the dazzling Lovborg (Richard Pyroe), and her only desire is to bore herself to death... but not before toying with the submissive Thea (Annabel Bates) and more than meeting her match in a power struggle with the loathsome, lascivious Judge Brack (Adam Best).

It is not all doom and gloom. Indeed Patrick Marber's adaptation has an acidic wit in the first act, when Hedda's tongue is waspish and she is full of jibes and upper cuts, yet darkness and the blues will descend as she destroys both others and herself in her hell. Watts's Hedda is both timeless and modern, at once torn from Greek tragedy and the diary of an It Girl, and her climactic scene with Best's Brack is brutal.

So many brilliantly impactful details mark out van Hove's direction, from every lighting change to the incidental music and eerie snippets from Joni Mitchell's Blue, Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah and Nina Simone's Wild Is The Wind. Under 26s can see Hedda Gabler for a fiver, but the full price is worth every penny too.

National Theatre in Hedda Gabler, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.co.uk