The Kreutzer Sonata

Leo Tolstoy's claustrophobic 1889 novella was banned in Russia and America. Its open description of sex seems less graphic today, but its sadistic radicalism still has the power to shock, even in an irredeemably tasteful staging like this one. 'The Kreutzer Sonata' is the monologue of a man who might be mad, a misogynist, a murderer or all three. But he's surprisingly pleasant company in Natalie Abrahami's production, for which the Gate Theatre's tiny stage is converted into a period railway carriage where Hilton McCrae's Pozdynyshev recounts his marital history over an admirably sustained 90 minutes.

Nancy Harris's adaptation and McCrae's intimate performance are unfailingly sensitive. And Abrahami's direction weaves the aesthetic elements of the story into a dreamy theatrical whole: Pozdynyshev's increasingly jealous flashbacks are illuminated by candle-lit glimpses of his piano-playing wife and her violinist, duetting passionately behind the gauze backdrop. You can't fault the production's delicacy - and that's the difficulty here. Tolstoy's narrator, like de Sade before him, wishes to liberate and destroy women. Even his contempt for music is a philosophy as well as a personal revelation: concert-going, he says, is 'like an evening spent at a brothel. You pay your money, you perspire - there is a vague feeling of release…and you return to life as it was, a bigger fraud than before.' But his paranoia, his cruelty, and his theories - finally united in a nakedly brutal knife-thrust - are over-clothed in eloquence and luscious music in this version of Pozdynyshev's monologue.

The conversational cosiness of the stage makes it hard to sustain the frightening possibility that our narrator may be profoundly unreliable. And this is sometimes a romanticised and overly sympathetic literary portrait of its man. Sophie Scott and Tobias Beer's live piano and violin music adds to the pleasure of theatrically illustrated Tolstoy. But, compared to 'Anna Karenina', or 'Brief Encounter', you never feel the full-throttle power of the train we're on, as it hurtles its doomed trio towards desire and destruction.