Thérèse Raquin - Riverside Studios
Preview by Lizzie Guilfoyle
MONTMIRAL Productions are presenting Pauline McLynn’s new translation of Emile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin at Riverside Studios – from Tuesday, August 19 to Sunday, September 7, 2008.
The inspiration for Thérèse Raquin came from the story of a married woman who had an affair with her husband’s best friend and then plotted to murder her husband with the help of her lover. Once the murder had taken place, the lovers were free to marry but their love soon turned to hate as they blamed each other for their crime. Eventually, they killed themselves, leaving behind a signed confession.
Zola was fascinated by this story, which he came across in 1866 when working as a journalist, and he used it as the basis to write what was to become his best-selling novel Thérèse Raquin. A masterly portrayal of Parisian petty bourgeois life in the late 19th Century and the darker, hidden elements of that society, Thérèse Raquin was subsequently turned into a play by Zola himself.
Although seemingly a love story at the start, the dramatic brilliance of the play lies in its slow descent into the murky depths of murder, guilt and revenge.
Zola’s ‘detached and scientific’ approach to the characters he created is considered to be an example of Naturalism, of which he was a self-proclaimed leader. In his preface to the novel he says, “I chose protagonists who were supremely dominated by their nerves and blood, deprived of free will and drawn into every action of their lives by the predetermined lot of their flesh. Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more.”
But although Zola wrote Thérèse Raquin as an exposition on human temperament, it’s also a play about conscience for Thérèse and Laurent cannot escape the consequences of their actions and they soon come to find that in death, even more than in life, the figure of their victim comes back to haunt them….
In the new production, Elizabeth Bowe will direct a cast that includes Jed Aukin, Matt Cooper, Beverley Eve, Odette Garvey, Valia Phyllis, Neil Sheffield and Alexander Zwart. Assistant director is Ben Willens.
Tickets: £15, £12.50 concessions, £10 previews (August 19 and 20).
Times: Tuesday to Saturday at 7.30pm; Sundays at 6pm.