The Kreutzer Sonata, Gate Theatre, review Tolstoy claimed he wrote his novella The Kreutzer Sonata (1889) in order to show the way carnal passion - whether inside or outside marriage - distracts man from the higher things in life. In Nancy Harris's arrestingly fine adaptation, though, first seen at the Gate in 2009 - and now revived ahead of a New York run - you swiftly grasp why it was banned by the Russian authorities: whatever moral one might draw from its portrait of a man driven to murder his wife by obsession, jealousy and disgust, the dominant motif is the debauchery of male sexual appetites and the suggestion that there's no release from their torments. Reaching into dark recesses of human behaviour, it draws a comfortless existential vision from a macabre case. Even though he was acquitted, for reasons (one assumes) of sexist patriarchy, Pozdynyshev - alone with us on a train that might as well be rattling through purgatory - is the prisoner of his memories, his guilt, and creepy, almost necrophiliac longings. In a riveting performance by the craggy, intensely mercurial Hilton McRae, he converses with us in a civilised, wrily detached fashion - trimly dressed, sipping his tea, darting sly, conspiratorial looks. Step by step this old council bureaucrat confides the insatiable ways of his bachelor days, shares his early infatuation with the "wide-eyed creature" who became his wife, and charts the descent from romantic bliss to marital hell, as a doting appreciation of his other half's virtues flips into tyrannical irritation at her shortcomings. Pozdynyshev is the author of his own pathological suspicion, compelling his spouse - after she renews her love of the piano - into musical partnership with an old friend turned successful violinist. The great coup of Natalie Abrahami's production is to reveal wife (Sophie Scott) and interloper (Tobias Beer) in taunting, haunting flashes, both projected into the carriage and glimpsed in a concealed recess, lustily getting to grips with Beethoven's "Kreutzer" sonata. What's particularly fascinating is how contemporary a note the piece strikes about relations between the sexes - and its explicit honesty together with its provoking generalisations ("Better to be a corpse than a spinster") possess an incendiary spark that much new writing balks at. One feels that Tolstoy, who wanted his tale staged, would have been heartened by how well it transfers and how long it has endured, but might well have been surprised at how bleakly and evilly it glints.