’The Kreutzer Sonata’ is a typically fierce short story by Tolstoy, which uses one train journey, one narrative and one soundtrack (Beethoven’s violin sonata of the same name) to track protagonist Pozdynyshev’s transition from jealous lover to murderous husband. It is a rich, sharp work that explores a character bursting with hopeless, endless contradictions. This is a man who refers to sex as ‘defiling’, to marriage as ‘hate at day and lust at night’ and to the opera house as a ‘graveyard for the living.’ This is a man who calls for abstinence – but only after killing his wife in a passionate, jealous rage. This is a man who has grown to hate love, to detest the senses and the sensual – as well as anyone, or anything attached to sensuality’s swaying and unpredictable influence.

As such, you’d think the theatre would be a brilliant place to tell Pozdynyshev’s story. It is a medium made for drawing out contradictions - a place where theatre’s sensual powers (music, lights, emotion, language) could have subtly interfered with Pozdynyshev’s cool, unflinching depiction of events. It is a place that could’ve highlighted the clash between Pozdynyshev’s jealous imaginings and his wife’s actual behaviour, between this protagonist’s hazy memory and confident narrative, between his feelings about music and his reaction to hearing it. The stage could have teased out and toyed with these impossible clashes, thus thickening Tolstoy’s already dense text.

Unfortunately, Natalie Abrahami’s production is a touch too controlled – not quite sensual or imaginative enough – and the stage and its effects end up oversimplifying this knotty piece. This is, most notably and most disappointingly, the case with most of the show’s musical flourishes. Nancy Harris’ adaptation is peppered with musical directions (‘the faintest sound of the violin somewhere off’) and it is obvious the text and music are meant to work closely and awkwardly together, generating conflicting and complementary emotions. But instead of layering on extra, surprising meaning, the musical sweeps blot out much of the original ambiguity.

The heavy chords feel too obvious - too black and white for this bleak, grey swept story. Tolstoy’s characters, emotions and words should not be this easy to define. As Pozdynyshev relates an argument he had with his wife, his outcry, ‘She turned round and called me selfish!’, is accompanied by dark, sawing violin chords. It feels unnecessary, a touch lazy and makes a subtle, complicated moment a relatively straightforward one.

There are similar instances like this, when the theatrical embellishments mitigate the subtle impact of the original. Abrahami has, cleverly, decided to use screens in this production – another chance for the stage to disrupt and undermine Pozdynyshev’s rigid, remorseless take on reality. Unfortunately, the pictures displayed on these screens are not hugely imaginative: we get flashes of Pozdynyshev’s wife playing the piano, images of her hands scrawling a letter, repeated shots of a bow sweeping violently across a violin. Again, these images are too literal and too simple. Rather than using the screens to haunt the protagonist, Abrahami uses them to back up his narrative and seriously undermines their potential power in the process.

There are moments when all the elements – text, theatre, music – come together, albeit briefly. As Pozdynyshev’s jealousy grows, the misty screen of the train carriage clears and behind it, accompanied by a booming and ominous bell chime, we see flashes of his wife’s imagined infidelity. With each boom, the lights flash and the adulterous couple are caught, frozen in a different embrace. These moments work brilliantly because they add to the text rather than simply backing up. More imaginative and freeing moments like this – which dig into the deepest recesses of Pozdynyshev’s disturbed mind – would have been nice.

As it is, without the right theatrical back up or the full, nestling, support of Tolstoy’s original text, this piece and its protagonist feel thin and ever so unreachable. Hilton McRae is a flexible and engaging actor but I couldn’t get to grips with his Pozdynyshev: he comes across as icy and logical at certain moments, simplistic and thug like at others and, conversely, a touch too likeable. It is a bloody hard part to play, but there was too much warmth from McRae and not enough flinty resistance for my liking. Perhaps if he had more to resist against – more competition from the music, images and ambience on-stage - his part might have crystallised, but his image feels a touch blurred (and not in a good way) here.

This show could have created a powerful synergy between theatre and music: it could’ve combined Tolstoy’s words and Beethoven’s music to create an exceptionally powerful production, with something quite profound to say about the impossibility of denying sensuality, of quelling impulse, creativity and passion. But this show isn’t quite rigorous or inventive enough and ends up only pointing to the complexities nestled in Tolstoy’s text, rather than using the stage to invoke and explore them.

Till 19 December 2009