Last season, a crackling revival of “Rope” at the Zipper theater showed there’s more to the late Patrick Hamilton’s work than stylish melodrama: There’s heart, too. Now, Charlotte Moore’s adroit revival of another Hamilton thriller, “Gaslight,” reinforces the impression. As a suspense writer, Hamilton may be old-fashioned, but he’s superb. And he’s no mere puppeteer; those are real people attached to his strings.

“Gaslight” may be best known for its 1944 film incarnation, directed by George Cukor and starring In grid Bergman, Charles Boyer, and a teenaged Angela Lansbury. As staged at the Irish Rep, the play retains all the delicious, shivery melodrama of an old movie.

There’s the gorgeous 1880 drawing room (by Deirdre Brennan) all deep reds, golds, and browns, lit by eerie, flickering gas lamps There’s Bella (Laura Odeh) the pale, small-waisted lady of the house, young and beautiful and troubled, and Jack (David Staller) her slightly older, somewhat men acing husband. There’s the pert lascivious servant girl, Nancy (Laoisa Sexton), and the proper housekeeper, Elizabeth (Patricia O’Connell, in a perfectly-modulated performance).

Yet Hamilton — who was admired by Graham Greene and Alfred Hitchcock, among others — takes his Victorian setup and maneuvers it into unnerving territory. Even as we recognize the deft manipulations of the plot, we are irresistibly compelled by the characters, who are so much more earnest than the apparatus that steers them. The terror of Bella, who has grown up knowing that her mother died in the asylum and now fears she is going mad, feels all too real. Her mind seems to tremble on the edge of sanity: Sometimes, she thinks she is master of her perceptions; other times, she feels she has lost all traction. It’s a part for which Ingrid Bergman won an Academy Award, and despite the Victorian trappings, Ms. Odeh’s performance has a heartbreaking authenticity. When her husband rages at her to find the objects missing from the room, and she admits she has no recollection of taking them down, there is something piteous and wretched in her sobs.

Jack, inflamed by Bella’s antics, goes out for the evening, and a very different sort of man enters in his place. He is Sergeant Rough (Brian Murray), a retired police detective, and his arrival is a pleasantly ironic corrective to all that florid hand-wringing. A grandfatherly fellow with whiskers and a watch fob in his vest, he pours Bella a whiskey from his flask and tells her that her husband is in fact a criminal who is attempting to drive her mad.

Like Rupert Cadell in “Rope,” Rough is an everyday man whose refusal to let evil run unchecked grows steadily into a formidable moral force. He isn’t there to play a cat-and-mouse detective game — he pours out what he knows too readily for that. His function is to spread warmth and concern where there was only cruelty, to give Bella the strength to endure a bit longer so Rough can catch the villain red-handed.

The second act’s suspense, then, comes from waiting to see if Jack will catch Bella before Rough and his men return to catch Jack. But though the device is a good engine for the play, the real fascination of “Gaslight” is in watching the interaction between the characters.

Ms. Moore knows this, and her staging gives us a good look at the humanity caught in the vise — fragile Bella, whose self-doubt swiftly surges back; smug Jack, whose brutality is made manifest in his shockingly low opinion of his wife; stalwart Elizabeth, whose strength under fire is deeply satisfying, a compensation for the squalor in the world.

Hamilton may set his lion on his lamb with the cool audacity of a Patricia Highsmith work, but his old-fashioned heart immediately begins to fight on the lamb’s behalf. Rough is a self-appointed defender of lambs; his deepest motive is to avenge the death of a certain lady known as the “cabmen’s friend,” whose generosity to the downtrodden was “her small stand against the evil in the world.” Somehow, Rough’s folksy humanism doesn’t feel put on; it’s Hamilton’s special talent to give such men enough earthiness to counterweight their rising heroism.

There are wonderful touches in Ms. Moore’s production — a scarf brandished ever so subtly like a potential weapon; the crushed-flower look of the diminutive Bella’s pink dress; the shuffling limp of Rough as he ducks into a closet; the pretty insolence of unsuspecting Nancy, and of course, the pulse-quickening rise and dip of the gaslight. “Gaslight” may strike some as too old-fashioned by half, but it’s a ripping work whose characters linger, and the Irish Rep’s production furnishes an occasion to reconsider both the plotting skill and the complex humanism of Patrick Hamilton.

Until July 8 (132 W. 22nd St., between Sixth and Seventh avenues, 212-727-2737).