“She’s only a bird in a gilded cage, a beautiful sight to see.” The old song plays on a scratchy gramophone at the start of The Yellow Wallpaper, an accomplished dance-theatre piece which captures the gothic tone of the late-Victorian short story. The woman in question – who’s never named in the original version, but here is identified as Jane – is taking a convalescent break in an elegant country home; as we watch her husband John and sister-in-law Jenny attend to her, we might think her confinement is privileged indeed. But as the lyrics turn to her “wasted life”, she takes a swig from a medicine bottle… and the line between treatment and imprisonment begins to blur.

Though this show’s first language is dance, the story’s told clearly in words. Jane speaks wistfully of the “pretty rooms downstairs”, but her physician husband demands she remain in her bedroom, an old nursery defined by its ugly yellow wallpaper. Deprived of other stimuli, Jane studies the wallpaper until it begins to overwhelm her, combining the geometric impossibilities of Escher with the hallucinatory dread of Lovecraft. And the backstory, revealed gradually and naturally through dialogue, grows creepier too: Jane’s baby is now in the care of her husband’s devoted sister.

The dance is near-flawless and the choreography equally well-conceived, avoiding the trap of conspicuously aping the story yet capturing its fluctuating mood. In one striking passage, the three dancers’ precise but wildly expansive movements convey an emotional tumult that transcends words. A buoyant, tonally surprising celebration signals release but also hints at mania, while a slow embrace between Jane and her husband stands in tender contrast to the surrounding unease. At times the dance seems to evoke the wallpaper itself, surrounding and enveloping Jane as she sleeps – and slowly, so subtly that it’s hard to notice the change, Jane begins to dance too.

There are theatrical coups as well, surprises which momentarily wrong-foot us and leave us, like Jane, wondering if we can trust the evidence of our own eyes. And the characterisation also admits more ambiguity than you might expect. There’s no doubt that Jane’s husband is overbearing and controlling, and the ease with which he persuades her to collude in her own isolation is one of the most troubling themes. But is he wickedly driving her psychosis for his own malevolent ends, does his high-handed insistence on treatment become a self-fulfilling prophecy, or is he truly doing his best within the limits of the medicine of the time? All three interpretations are possible, and the script wisely leaves us to strike our own balance between them.

And the show is finely balanced too. The tone may be gothic and the scenario grotesque, but the eloquent dance makes the story all too easy to believe. Like the yellow wallpaper itself, its patterns keep working on your mind.