It's 10 years since Elizabeth Alton rose to prominence playing now-beloved icy Bond Girl Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale. Since then she has gone from strength to strength in a range of demanding, complex roles: on stage, starring as Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie opposite Jude Law at the Donmar and on TV bringing fierce glamour and unpredictability to the part of 'The Woman' Irene Adler in the BBC's Sherlock while finally making it big in the US as Amy Dunne, the nightmarish femme fatale of David Fincher's watercooler thriller Gone Girl, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award.

Now, nearly 35, she takes on Ibsen's most finely wrought anti-heroine Hedda Gabler, the model of destructive marital discontent, in a production that marks the debut at the National of fast-ascending Belgian director Ivo van Hove. Although I admired his stripped-back production of A View from the Bridge a few years ago I have remained pretty agnostic about his supposed exceptionality. Yet with this smartly conceived and surprisingly understated reading of an overfamiliar classic – lent a fresh translation by Patrick Marber – I have now joined the converts. This is a bold, clear, finally harrowing account of the play.

And if I wasn't an Altonian – I certainly am now; she is sensational. Sensational might suggest "showy", but Alton's gift is to keep us watching when she is almost a bystander. At the start, she's already in situ at a piano, tinkling away, her back to us. She might as well be somewhere else as others walk and talk around her minimally furnished apartment that is the home for herself and her newly-wed academic bore of a husband Tesman. Barefoot, in négligée and dressing-robe, she detests her surroundings and him; and confides as much. But the beauty of the performance is it catches shifting attitudes; there's a scoffing aloofness and recklessness but also a subtle softness, brought out in reveries of better times and solitary interludes when we hear the melancholy sound of Joni Mitchell's Blue.

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elizabethalton Supremely grateful for this opportunity, and maybe a little bit nervous for my first press night in nearly two years! Thank you @nationaltheatre for letting me play with you for the first time. Hedda's not a very nice girl (probably not even a Cool one), but I love sharing my version of her with the world. We're here til 21 March... come see. xx E

Do tell 'em, Alton!