This is the last article you can read this month
You can read more article this month
You can read more articles this month
Sorry your limit is up for this month
Reset on:
Please help support the Morning Star by subscribing here
Therese Raquin
Directed by Nona Shepphard
Park Theatre
Rating: 2/5
Transferring from a sell-out premiere at the Finborough Theatre, this adaptation of Zola’s eloquent and disturbing story should have hit the spot.
The promotional bumf claims that “in keeping with the innovative and challenging nature of the original work, this radical new musical adaptation uses music and lyrics to heighten and distil the underlying themes.”
This is a sentiment to make us wary. In a tale driven by brooding subtext and unspoken personal hell, musical-style lyrics apply the themes on with a trowel.
Julie Atherton stars as the story’s namesake, an intelligent and passionate young woman in 1860s Paris, suffocating within the confines of a life micromanaged by her stifling aunt and milksop first-cousin husband.
While she looks the part, it’s hard to gauge her abilities because of some truly Disneyfied directing from Nona Shepphard as in a cringeworthy “female empowerment” scene in which she runs her hands along her curves, tosses her hair about with a pantomime approximation of wild abandon, lifts up her skirt and sings about her Algerian mother’s blood being “hot in my veins.”
The following number, in which she and Laurent simulate sex while she praises his broad shoulders, big hands and “peasant stock” was what young people would call a “facepalm” moment.
What should be an affirmation of the suppressed Therese’s new power and agency is snatched away by poor directing, leaving a male character to tell us what she is thinking and feeling.
Whereas Zola has Therese and Laurent plotting her husband’s death together, this adaptation makes it appear for all the world as if Camille drowns accidentally.
The fact that they pushed him into the water is reserved until the end for a big reveal, making a cheap “Dun dun dun!” moment.
Madame “Mother” Raquin is the only characterisation which feels right, with the superb Tara Hugo portraying her cloying homeliness as she sings of her “snuggy little” shop, son and niece.
Later on and in her locked-in state, she becomes the grotesquely disembodied pair of vengeful eyes, completing a metamorphosis from ignorance to knowledge.
As the cast bows out, you are left to wonder how a profoundly psychological novel could have been adapted with so little inner life.
