THE first "proper play" of the year in York in 2017 was Gaslight, Patrick Hamilton's English thriller of Freudian psychology and Victorian melodrama, at the Grand Opera House.

Thirteen months later, the same production team returns to the Cumberland Street theatre with another brilliant piece of taut drama, this time from America. Same director, set and costume designer, lighting designer and sound and music team, and like last year, there is a Tointon in the cast, Hannah following older sister Kara into York.

Chances are you will know Strangers On A Train from Alfred Hitchcock's 1951 film, the one where Guy Haines is a pro tennis star, his second wife is a senator's daughter, and the psychotic socialite is called Bruno Anthony, not Charles Bruno.

Craig Warner goes back to Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel for his new stage adaptation, where psychotic socialite, mummy's boy and repressed homosexual Charles Bruno(Chris Harper) invites himself to sit opposite fast-rising architect Guy Haines (Jack Ashton) on a train south, striking up a conversation over a shared hip-flask.

He reckons two complete strangers can get away with murder: Bruno wants rid of his father to inherit his fortune; Haines's wife is dilly-dallying over their divorce, delaying his plan to marry the much better matched Anne Faulkner (Hannah Tointon). They clink glasses, agreeing to do the deed for the other.

This opening scene immediately establishes that Anthony Banks's direction and Warner's dialogue are of the highest order, so too the performances and the technical aplomb of the design, which combines the Fifties set and costume design chic of David Woodhead with the video and projection work of Duncan McLean.

The initial imagery of American stripes (but no stars) pulls away to reveal the train carriage, the seats claustrophobic in their closeness. Sound men Ben and Max Ringham go to work on creating the sometimes quiet, sometimes deafening progress of the train down the tracks, matched by Howard Hudson's constantly changing lighting.

The video projections present the frontages of houses that rise or fall to reveal assorted rooms, a moving stairwell and even a locomotive at the finale. Year by year, we see design work becoming a show in itself, but here, crucially, it is always in service to the performance.

Not only the emotional ebb and flow of Ashton's burdened Haines, caught in an unwilling and regretful relationship with Harper's alcohol-fuelled psycho Bruno, draws you in, but so does Tointon's Anne, who should not be judged by initial impressions. Helen Anderson is tremendous too as Bruno's troubled, fraught mother Elsie and John Middleton slips comfortably into his first stage role since leaving Emmerdale, bringing gumshoe gravitas to Iowa private detective Arthur Gerard.

Don't be a stranger to Strangers On A Train. The Grand Opera House already has had one pearl of a play this year in the National Theatre's Hedda Gabler and this Highsmith thriller is another high.

Strangers On A Train, Ambassador Theatre Group/Smith & Brant Theatricals, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday. Box office: 0844 871 3024 or at atgtickets.com/york