NORA HELMER is one of theatre’s greatest-ever characters. The hero of Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House, which shocked audiences in 1879 when it was first produced, hers is a revolutionary tale, a journey of self-emancipation culminating in her decision to leave her husband and children.

At the time, deserting a marriage was scandalous enough — abandoning children was considered depraved.

It’s easy to make the mistake that such attitudes are in the past. What few choices we had back then, we might say with relief, aren’t things so much better now?

But are they? The brilliance of playwright Stef Smith’s concept in Nora is that she urges us to reconsider the complacency of that response in her reimagining of Ibsen’s story. In her version there are three Noras, each marooned in a different moment of time but just as domestically trapped as each other.

There’s 1918’s Nora, secretly elated by the recent victory for women in winning the right to vote, 1968’s Nora — stifled by her duties as a housewife and numbing her frustrations with Valium — and 2018’s Nora, just about making ends meet.

More straight-talking and expressive than her repressed predecessors, she’s arguably the most isolated out of all three.

In lesser hands, the constant role-switching, in which all three actors play their own period’s Nora and Nora’s friend Kristine at different points, might feel confusing or contrived. But director Elizabeth Freestone is so exacting and careful with Smith’s material that almost every moment feels fluid, graceful and clear.

And there are some strong performances. As 1918’s Nora, standing on the precipice of great change, Molly Vevers practically quivers with rageful hope, all the while never letting her sweet “songbird” demeanour slip.

But the standout is Anna Russell-Martin as 2018’s Nora, who displays an outstanding mix of toughness and vulnerability as she struggles to survive in austerity Britain in a production that goes the extra mile by examining the impacts of cuts and poverty on women today and suggesting in the process that we might not have made as much progress as we think.

Runs until April 6, box office: tramway.org