Matt Smith returns to playing a doctor in this updated version of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play, now running at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre – not to be confused with the Duke of Edinburgh whom Smith played in The Crown.

The Doctor discovers that his town’s spa water is contaminated and urges that the local baths are shut down, much to the chagrin of the mayor (Paul Hilton), who awkwardly happens to be the doc’s brother. The baths are the lifeblood of the local economy and shutting them down would mean raising taxes, prompting pushback from members of the press, who awkwardly happen to be the doc’s bandmates.

And boy is it awkward. The doctor and his wife (neither of whom play instruments) are in a band with two men from the newspaper for reasons that are never explained, nor is their choosing to rehearse at the dining table. It makes you wonder if they might have to enter a Battle of the Bands to save the town at the end but this is not the case – probably for the best as they would absolutely lose.

Equally superfluous is the wife’s (Jessica Brown Findlay) incredibly brief entanglement with the newspaper’s editor (Shubham Saraf) which adds nothing to the story, and solely serves to highlight a lack of cast chemistry. Even the staging, usually so inventive on the West End, is unremarkable, enlivened only by occasional appearances of the dog owned by the doctor’s father-in-law (Nigel Lindsay).

The Jaws-like story is interesting in its timeliness, and there is no danger of its modern-day parallels being lost on a single audience member, thanks to a rewrite so heavy-handed even the dog looked like he got it. This version brings the play into modern Britain with references to the pandemic and Tories and social media in a way that detracts from what is interesting about those parallels in the first place.

It would be much more rewarding to watch the original story and see those parallels for ourselves – how over a century later we face the exact same problems, still beholden to the same power dynamics between press, politicians and the scientific community. If Tom Basden’s recent reworking of Accidental Death of an Anarchist showed how to update a European text with modern references, this is how not to do it, continually interrupting Ibsen to explain how clever the director is.

These interruptions include awkward audience interaction and vast quantities of paint, giving the play the air of a fringe production that has only wound up on the West End because the doctor awkwardly happens to be Matt Smith.