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A disgraced financier, his humiliated wife, family torn apart, the crook defiant. No, Bernie Madoff’s story has not been turned into a Broadway musical. Henrik Ibsen’s rarely revived "John Gabriel Borkman" has come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in a production starring Alan Rickman, Lindsay Duncan and Fiona Shaw that is full of wintry atmosphere.

The title character of Ibsen’s bone-chilling study of guilt, regret and hubris is a bank manager who embezzled money from clients and served five years in jail. For the past eight years after his release, Borkman has lived in purgatorial self-imprisonment in an upstairs room of his sister-in-law’s home, where he paces and broods.

His estranged, bitter wife, Gunhild, the vibrant, ferocious Fiona Shaw, lives below, never seeing her despised spouse. One day, Gunhild’s sister Ella visits. Lindsay Duncan’s Ella, cool but sympathetic, offers a nice balance to Shaw’s fire.

As Ibsen’s four-act drama plays out, Borkman reveals he is not sorry for stealing his clients’ money -- he just resents being caught. In his reunion with Ella, it becomes clear that Borkman traded in love for career advancement.

The ex-banker is not alone in capitalizing on human relations. In Ibsen’s moody but ultimately thrilling work, human beings have been reduced to commodities, to be traded and haggled over by various parties for emotional value.

James Macdonald’s superbly acted, starkly gorgeous production treads that tricky line between naturalism and expressionism. Tom Pye’s stylish set mixes period furniture and ominous snowbanks that lurk at the periphery of the Borkmans’ house.

Alan Rickman’s tight, coiled performance features his characteristic drawl and snarl, but here he is working with more layered, ambiguous material, a play that marks a transitional point in Ibsen between his great dramas of social critique and his late, dreamlike period.

Although every season or so we can depend on yet another "Hedda Gabler" or "A Doll’s House," it is gratifying to see a lesser-done Ibsen get such a memorable re-assessment.