Emile Zola's novel comes in three flavours. The first is boredom: the stultifying repression of the young Thérèse by her feeble husband Camille and his domineering mother. The second is passion: the primal sexual forces released when Thérèse and the brutish Laurent embark on an illicit affair. The third is guilt: the paralysing remorse suffered by the lovers after their drowning of Camille.
The challenge to anyone adapting this for the stage is that Zola expresses all three states - boredom, lust and guilt - not by what is said, but by what goes unsaid. Theatre needs words, yet in the book Thérèse is compelling because of her silence. Every sentence she utters on stage in an effort to express her turmoil risks making her less enigmatic and more mundane.
Because of this, Jeremy Raison's debut as the Citizens' artistic director finds itself taking a dash through the events of the story without capturing the extremes of emotion that underpin them. Carla Henry's Thérèse is shrill and contrary rather than a woman gripped by intense feeling. Dermot Kerrigan's Laurent has a similarly superficial relationship to the forces that drive him. It's hard to care when they reach their tragic end in the play's oddly tepid conclusion.
Raison's staging is thoughtful, fluid and ambitious and it looks good, thanks to Charles Balfour's moody lighting and Soutra Gilmour's set. But the director's mix-and-match approach to style is more interfering than purposeful. Once, but only once, the stagehands do some bad modern dance; sometimes, but not always, the actors spin their way out of a scene; meanwhile Corin Buckeridge's music occasionally adds to the atmosphere but often has the inappropriate grandiosity of a Harry Potter score.
Such details might not have been so distracting if the emotional heart of the story was in place.
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