THE National Theatre of Scotland has spent much of the last 19 Covid-stricken months creating screen work for both the internet and television (the latter landing them Bafta Scotland nominations for Adam and Fatbaws).

It is curious, therefore, that in returning to live theatrical performance, the company should offer a piece that is an uncomfortable hybrid of stage play and live film.

The Enemy, Kieran Hurley’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 classic An Enemy of the People, resets the play in contemporary Scotland. Director Finn den Hertog and (his brother) video designer Lewis den Hertog achieve the modern setting largely by way of film and digital technologies, communicated via a huge screen above the stage.

In Hurley’s version, Ibsen’s aspiring spa town becomes an unnamed, depressed Scottish conurbation, its heart ripped out by the closure, in the 1980s, of the single industry that sustained it. Salvation is promised in the shape of the Big Splash resort, a huge indoor health and leisure facility.

As in Ibsen’s play, the opening of the resort is jeopardised by the discovery (by the project’s founding director and chief scientist Kirsten Stockmann) that its all-important water supply is contaminated. The discovery plunges Stockmann into conflict with her sister (the town’s provost Vonny Stockmann) and her estranged stepfather Derek Kilmartin (a powerful local businessman played by Billy Mack).

The plot of Hurley’s piece shadows Ibsen’s faithfully, raising similar conflicts of conscience and policy. However, the production’s obsessive use of screen technologies seriously undermines its theatricality.

For instance, at one early point, the Stockmann sisters speak by means of a video conference. Both actors, Hannah Donaldson (Kirsten) and Gabriel Quigley (Vonny), are on-stage, a fact that is rendered almost irrelevant by their conversation being projected on to the screen above their heads.

This technique is repeated again and again throughout the production.

Taqi Nazeer’s local pop star Aly Aslaksen conducts his video-cast from a box at the back of the set, while we watch proceedings on the screen.

Neil McKinven’s Benny Hovstad, a would-be campaigning journalist with a closet full of skeletons, is called to a car park by the provost. Their conversation is relayed via CCTV on the ever-active video monitor.

Ironically, far from being cutting edge, in technological terms, the film work is reminiscent of the live broadcast dramas of the early days of television almost a century ago.

All of which is a terrible pity, as Hurley’s adaptation boasts a superb cast (in which young Eléna Redmond shines as Kirsten Stockmann’s daughter Petra).

The actors put in universally fine performances, despite playing on Jen McGinley’s terrible set, an identikit civic space that is desperately inflexible and entirely incapable of accommodating the play’s various locations.

Hurley’s writing is fluid and pungent, exhibiting more of the traits of naturalistic TV drama than of Ibsen’s more subtle social realism.

At the play’s conclusion, the writer almost loses his connection to Ibsen, getting tied up in the 21st-century phenomenon of social media abuse.

One can see the logic in Hurley’s turning to the internet as the social forum of our times, but more is lost than gained in his transforming the piece into a histrionic melodrama about the impact of digital bullying.

Great drama is universal. Its capacity to connect with modern audiences lies in its timeless expression of essential and seminal aspects of our common humanity.

Like so many other productions before it, this passable, but disappointing Ibsen falters on its misguided belief that the classic it is adapting is rendered more relevant by being dragged into our own times.