Therese Raquin

Synopsis

Zola's only well known play? Therese Raquin is recognised as one of the best psychological thrillers! But on its appearance, Therese Raquin caused a storm: it was placed on the Papal Index of works Catholics were not permitted to read and was variously described as pornography, a quagmire of slime and blood, a sewer, garbage. Undoubtedly still a passionate tale of adultery, murder and retribution - yet described by Zola as "a slice of life thrown on the stage without embellishment or artifice" - this is a chilling and dramatic adaptation, laced with wit, of what is now a hugely popular novel.

Our Review:

14 November 2006

There were two outstanding productions of Emile Zola’s play Therese Raquin (which he adapted from his 1867 novel) in the early 1990s: an erotic, supercharged but totally naturalistic tale of a relationship based on lust and lost in murder at the Minerva, Chichester; and an expressionistic, water-drenched laboratory experiment that began in the Leicester Haymarket studio and came to the Young Vic.

Marianne Elliott’s remarkable revival combines the best of both those worlds, using the fleet translation Nicholas Wright provided for the first. The tensions of a moral thriller in which Therese and her lover, the painter Laurent, murder her husband on a boating trip, are at first zipped up in sombre, 19th-century restraint; but they break loose in a strange, hallucinatory sequence of anguished bed-time tableaux where guilt, anger and frustration have replaced sex and sensuality.

The cramped Parisian living quarters where “everything is piled up on each ...

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Latest User Review

212.100.250.225) - 8 January 2007:

It never ceases to amaze me how different people see different things in the same production. I found this production (which I saw on a Saturday matinee with an audience member with the worst hearing aid whining i've ever witnessed!) totally thrilling.I found the two leads utterly riveting and the sexual chemistry between them was hothothot!!!Unlike the previous poster I absolutely loved the nightmare sequence - it was so theatrically bold - and mirrors the novel's relentlessness. I cannot recommend this production highly enough. ...

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