The Kreutzer Sonata, published in 1889, doesn’t fit the familiar image of Tolstoy. It is an unsettling vision of one man’s misgivings about sex, and the novella’s attack on the very idea of carnality led at the time to its being banned in Russia then in America.

Nancy Harris’s adaptation, crisp and emotionally intelligent, conveys the power of Tolstoy’s original. We are on board a night train - in a dimly lit carriage neatly designed by Chloe Lamford, with poetic projections by Ian William Galloway - and focused on Pozdnyshev, a well-dressed man of middle age.

This smart but evidently troubled figure reaches out to us. His manner, at first confessional and almost languid, gradually becomes impassioned. “I am not a music lover,” he declares, and soon enough we find out why.

We learn that his wife started to play the piano — a “gleaming monstrosity” — after the birth of their fifth child. She became entangled with a violinist; together they played Beethoven’s Kreutzer sonata, and the emotion of the piece spilled over into their relationship.

“I wanted to kill him on sight,” Pozdnyshev recalls. But his jealousy is complex. In Hilton McRae’s delicately executed interpretation, he has the ghoulish quietness of a man whose whole being has been corroded, yet his haunted manner sometimes makes way for a volley of fiercely accurate invective.

Natalie Abrahami’s production is uncomfortably atmospheric. The music, performed behind a gauzy screen by Sophie Scott and Tobias Beer, weaves insidiously in and out of Pozdnyshev’s narrative; we see the way it has wormed into his imagination.

The experience of Harris’s play is a jolt to the system, a journey into the pathology of suspicion and self‑loathing. Only a weak ending and a small number of fumbled lines compromise its memorably eerie intensity.

Until 5 December (020 7229 0706, www.gatetheatre.co.uk).