AT THE risk of incurring the wrath of Ibsen's ghost by associating his hoary legacy with the sordid excesses of contemporary pop culture, the climactic denouement presented in Mabou Mines DollHouse - where lead character Nora strips off her frilly clothes and blonde wig to reveal her naked body and bald head - reminded me vividly of the recent troubles of erstwhile pop princess Britney Spears. More on that later.

Ibsen's 1879 A Doll's House has long been lauded as a feminist tract. In this seminal play, a docile wife comes to realise that her husband regards her as a plaything and not a partner. This leads to her decision to abandon her marriage and children and "set about getting experience" - a shocking and controversial ending for 19th-century Europe.

These days, this business of Nora coming to this realisation may well be tiresome and dated.

After all, lots of women left the restrictions of house and hearth behind long ago. Why should female bankers, fund managers and their fellow financially savvy sisters not raise a sardonic eyebrow at the pathetically befuddled Nora and decide to do something else instead of wasting three hours watching thisplay?

Well, first of all, there is the considerable pleasure of watching director Lee Breuer's remarkable re-conception of the play.

In the original text, Torvald makes Nora psychologically diminutive by calling her nicknames like "little skylark", "little spendthrift" and "pretty little pet". In this staging, all the male characters are played by actors under 1.3m.

Consequently, Maude Mitchell's Nora towers physically over her Torvald (a commanding Mark Povinelli) when she stands erect, which is not often.

The result is a fascinating exercise in physicality: Mitchell is most often prostrate, hunched or scurrying about on her knees, contorting herself to fit into the child-sized scale of the set. Her voice, until the operatic finale, is placed in a breathy register somewhere between Marilyn Monroe and Minnie Mouse.

The message is clear: the suppression of female identity in an oppressive patriarchy. But you also marvel at how much effort and skill it takes to engineer this suppression and subject yourself to manipulation.

Mitchell's powerful performance was key to engendering this marvel. She has a way of inclining her head with a sort of marionette snap, for example, that is both wickedly funny and sarcastically sinister. In fact, DollHouse turns out to be quite horrifyingly not dated, which makes the gallows humour of the production particularly apt.

To return to Britney for a moment: Her unravelling, of late, has all the motifs of Nora's predicament, that of a woman who learnt so well how to be a desirable doll, and suddenly throws it all away after realising what she has become.

Most of us are not all troubled young Hollywood stars. But many among us remain fascinated by the women whose sudden disintegration betrays the remaining rigidities of a world we usually perceive to be freer and better than it was before.

Perhaps this is why we are invited to view this DollHouse as a joke, filled to the brim with ribald double entendres and deliberate melodramatic excesses. To become a part of this deconstruction, the audience is put in the position of the weary sophisticate. The production crafts an internal monologue for you that goes something like this: Yes, I know things have changed. Yes, I know they also haven't changed that much. Isn't self-awareness funny?

It was funny, sometimes downright hilarious. But being in a state of ironic detachment and knowing bemusement for almost three hours is an exhausting business. There were moments when I longed for the simple outrage of the 19th-century European.